Scott R. Frieling

Two Brothers at the Tire Plant

Gary and Randy Eaves worked around benzene-bearing solvents at the same tire plant. Both developed blood cancers. Their family carried two occupational histories into one California courtroom and obtained a $21.385 million verdict.

At Cooper Tire & Rubber in Texarkana, Gary and Randy Eaves handled jobs that regularly involved solvents sold under trade names. The exposure history depended on identifying the chemicals inside those products and matching them to each brother’s work.

Gary later developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Randy developed acute myeloid leukemia. Both brothers died. Regina Eaves brought the family’s claims against companies that had supplied solvents used at the plant.

Scott Frieling tried the case with Mary Alexander and Rajeev Mittal in Contra Costa County, California. Over four weeks, the jury heard workplace testimony, product and supplier history, industrial-hygiene evidence, warnings, exposure pathways, and medical causation. The combined presentation allowed common evidence about the plant and the solvent products to be heard beside the separate work history, diagnosis, and losses of each brother.

Fifty-Eight Percent to Union Oil

After three days of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict on March 29, 2019. It awarded $21,385,000 and assigned fifty-eight percent of the responsibility to Union Oil.

Because the brothers worked in the same plant, much of the exposure evidence was shared. Causation still had to be proved separately for each man: what he did, how the supplied products entered his work, how long the contact continued, which disease followed, and what his family lost.

Twenty-Four Parts per Million-Years

Donald Walter Schultz painted and spray-painted industrial equipment, walls, ceilings, pipes, and plant surfaces during the 1980s. At one U.S. Steel facility, he spray-painted approximately one thousand tons of equipment during an eighteen-month assignment. Several paints and solvents used in the work contained benzene.

Schultz was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2005 and died the following year. No personal monitor had followed him through the paint booth decades earlier. The exposure therefore had to be reconstructed from the work itself.

Frieling and Allen Stewart represented the family on appeal. An industrial hygienist combined coworker testimony, product composition, material-safety data, room dimensions, ventilation, application methods, hours, and published measurements. Dr. David Ozonoff translated those inputs into an estimated cumulative exposure of approximately twenty-four parts per million-years.

An oncologist then used medical literature, the exposure estimate, weight-of-evidence analysis, and differential diagnosis to connect the occupational history to Schultz’s leukemia. The central question was whether those methods were sufficiently reliable for adversarial testing.

In June 2013, a unanimous Seventh Circuit restored the claim against Akzo Nobel Paints. Rule 702 did not demand one epidemiological study replicating Schultz’s exact employment history. Experts could synthesize multiple reliable forms of evidence, disclose the assumptions, and allow cross-examination to test the result.

The decision assigned neither liability nor damages. Instead, it established that missing contemporaneous dose records left historical exposure open to proof through a transparent reconstruction capable of carrying the chemistry of an ordinary shift into a jury room.

Five Bodies of Science

Brian Milward worked as a refrigeration technician beginning in 1973. His employment placed him around products containing benzene. In 2004, he was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia, a comparatively uncommon subtype of acute myeloid leukemia.

Frieling was part of the plaintiffs’ team that developed the federal expert record. Their general-causation expert, Dr. Martyn Smith, did not rely on one decisive study. He assembled five bodies of evidence: benzene’s established relationship to the broader AML category; the biological relationship among AML subtypes; chromosomal damage associated with benzene; a mechanism involving topoisomerase II inhibition; and epidemiological evidence bearing on APL specifically.

The district court treated the analysis as insufficiently atomized. The First Circuit took a different view in 2011. Scientific inference can emerge from the combined force of individually incomplete studies when the expert explains how the evidence fits together, addresses uncertainty, and uses an accepted weight-of-evidence method informed by the Bradford Hill considerations.

A team that included Frieling built the appellate record and explained how the five bodies of evidence supported Dr. Smith’s general-causation opinion. Courts later cited the decision alongside Schultz when evaluating expert opinions that combine several kinds of scientific evidence rather than relying on one study that mirrors a worker’s history.

Thirty-Five Years of Brakes and Clutches

Roland Leo Grenier Sr. spent approximately thirty-five years as an automobile mechanic. Removing, cleaning, sanding, and replacing brakes and clutches repeatedly placed him near dust released from friction products. He was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2005.

Frieling and Rick Nemeroff represented Grenier in Delaware. Asbestos fibers were embedded inside components designed to wear. Frieling and Nemeroff had to prove what the older parts contained, how mechanics serviced them, how removal and cleaning released respirable fibers, and how often Grenier performed those tasks.

At the 2007 trial, pathology, epidemiology, product identification, and occupational testimony connected Grenier’s disease to automotive asbestos exposure. After a three-week trial and approximately ten hours of deliberation over two days, the jury returned a unanimous $2 million verdict.

Jurors assigned seventy percent of the fault to General Motors, sixteen percent to Ford, and two percent to each of seven additional companies. Those allocations tied Grenier’s exposure record to individual manufacturers.

Grenier after the Rule 702 Remand

General Motors and Ford challenged the admission of Grenier’s causation experts. In February 2009, the Delaware Supreme Court returned the matter for a limited clarification of the trial court’s Rule 702 reasoning while retaining appellate jurisdiction.

The Superior Court then set out the evidentiary foundation in detail. It addressed pathology, epidemiology, differential diagnosis, Grenier’s work history, product exposure, and the experts’ reasons for attributing mesothelioma to automotive asbestos. The court again concluded that the testimony was admissible.

The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed because the trial court identified the pathology, epidemiology, differential diagnosis, work history, product exposure, and expert reasoning supporting admissibility. That explanation preserved Grenier’s judgment on appeal.

Household PCB Exposure

Barbara Good, Jenny Hampel, Tomas Rosado, and their families lived near a Massachusetts manufacturing site associated with PCB production. They alleged that PCBs had been dumped for nearly forty years, moved through a creek and neighboring property, and entered homes as wind-blown dust.

Frieling and James Piel represented the families. Unlike Frieling’s factory and garage cases, the PCB claims required the team to trace contamination from an industrial site into a neighborhood and into the residents’ homes and bodies. The clients had not mixed the chemical into paint or handled it in a brake assembly. They lived, walked, played, gardened, and raised children beside the place where contamination allegedly crossed the industrial boundary.

Environmental samples, household dust, soil, food pathways, blood data, historical operations, and residential routines had to be read together. A neighborhood exposure can be spread across thousands of ordinary acts, none memorable by itself: opening a window, walking through a yard, preparing food, or a child returning indoors with dust on shoes and clothing.

The matter settled before verdict. The disclosed result included a substantial confidential resolution and comprehensive residential cleanup and restoration. It addressed the disputed personal injuries through compensation and the property through cleanup and restoration.

Every Meal as an Exposure Pathway

In another Massachusetts PCB opening, Frieling described two men eating milk and cereal, eggs, potatoes, chicken, and vegetables over a lifetime. “With every meal they were eating PCBs that had permeated the entire environment,” he told the jury.

Workers may remember the solvent drum or the brake job; residents may never see the original PCB product. The chemical moves through soil, dust, animals, crops, water, and food until exposure is distributed across daily life.

At trial, that route must be proved without claiming more certainty than the evidence permits. Sampling establishes locations and ranges. Historical records identify sources and timing. Toxicology and medicine connect persistence, absorption, and disease. The family’s routines explain how contamination traveled from the site into the body.

Fourteen Years of Roundup

Kelly Martel used ready-to-use Roundup at three Pennsylvania properties from 1998 through 2014. The container came with a trigger. Season after season, she treated weeds herself. In 2020, doctors diagnosed her with follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Frieling joined the Philadelphia trial team. During the three-week trial, the lawyers presented evidence about Martel’s Roundup use, glyphosate and product formulation, epidemiology, warnings, regulatory history, competing scientific interpretations, and medical causation.

In December 2023, the jury awarded $500,000 in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. It allocated 92.5 percent of the fault to Monsanto and 7.5 percent to Nouryon.

Delay damages increased the judgment to $3,544,363.01. On June 25, 2025, the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed in a nonprecedential memorandum. It upheld the Philadelphia venue ruling, the failure-to-warn theory under the preemption law applied in that appeal, the causation evidence, and the punitive award.

Martel’s route of exposure began in her own yard rather than a factory. The proof still followed the same progression: identify the product, establish use over time, explain the chemical and formulation, connect the scientific literature to the diagnosis, and preserve the judgment through review.

One Worker, Many Industrial Sites

Wayne Rogers worked as an industrial painter and construction foreman at shipyards, steel mills, paper mills, petroleum facilities, and chemical plants in Louisiana and Texas. His career placed him around asbestos-containing products supplied by numerous manufacturers and used at sites controlled by multiple premises owners.

Rogers developed mesothelioma and died shortly after diagnosis. Frieling and Piel represented the family. Unlike a one-product case, the legal work had to separate exposure by site, year, product category, manufacturer, premises owner, and the corporate histories that determined which entity remained responsible decades later.

The representation produced substantial aggregate settlements from premises owners and product manufacturers, together with significant payments from asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The amounts remain confidential. The structure is public enough to show how compensation was assembled: direct civil claims against solvent defendants and trust claims against companies whose asbestos liabilities had moved into bankruptcy systems.

A multi-site industrial career creates no single defendant capable of explaining the whole exposure. The lawyer must reconstruct the work location by location and then match each segment to the legal channel still available.

Accounting before Toxic Tort

Frieling earned a Bachelor of Business Administration and a Master in Professional Accounting before graduating with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law in 1999. He moved directly into plaintiff-side toxic-tort litigation.

Frieling’s accounting education is visible in the quantitative discipline of the cases. Exposure models depend on traceable inputs, time periods, allocation, and transparent assumptions; reported outcomes must also distinguish verdicts, judgments, settlements, trust payments, and restoration.

Frieling’s docket includes benzene, asbestos, PCBs, dioxin, lead, chromium, arsenic, pesticides, and other industrial substances. Each matter requires substance-specific evidence concerning source, route of exposure, duration, dose, and disease.

Reconstructing the Exposure

Eaves joined two brothers’ solvent histories in one jury trial; Schultz quantified factory-painting exposure; Milward addressed weight-of-evidence causation; Grenier followed decades of brake and clutch work through appeal; and Martel involved repeated household use.

The PCB and Rogers matters required broader source maps, including neighborhood contamination, food pathways, multiple worksites, product manufacturers, premises owners, and bankruptcy trusts.

Frieling’s case preparation identifies the product, chemical composition, exposure route, duration, estimated dose, disease, and responsible entity for each claim.