Scott R. Frieling

Toxic-Exposure Trials and Appeals

Scott R. Frieling represents plaintiffs in benzene, asbestos, PCB, pesticide, and other toxic-exposure litigation in state and federal courts.

The Eaves Benzene Verdict

Gary and Randy Eaves worked around benzene-bearing solvents at Cooper Tire & Rubber in Texarkana and later developed blood cancers. Scott Frieling tried the family’s claims with Mary Alexander and Rajeev Mittal in Contra Costa County. The four-week trial addressed product identification, industrial hygiene, warnings, exposure pathways, and medical causation.

At the Texarkana plant, solvent use was part of ordinary industrial work and the products arrived from suppliers under trade names. The team had to establish what each brother did, how the supplied products entered the work, how long the contact continued, and how the common plant evidence related to each brother’s separate exposure and causation record.

On March 29, 2019, after three days of deliberation, the jury awarded the family $21,385,000 and assigned 58 percent of the responsibility to Union Oil.

The verdict made the product history visible: the jury evaluated two related occupational-disease claims, accepted the exposure and causation evidence, and assigned a quantified share of responsibility to the solvent supplier.

Federal Expert-Evidence Appeals

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. Because no personal monitor had recorded his dose decades earlier, the exposure had to be reconstructed from the work itself.

Frieling and Allen Stewart represented the family of industrial painter Donald Walter Schultz on appeal in a benzene case. An industrial hygienist reconstructed Schultz’s historical exposure from coworker testimony, product composition, safety data, work conditions, and published measurements and estimated his cumulative exposure at approximately 24 parts per million-years. An oncologist used that estimate with medical literature, weight-of-evidence analysis, and differential diagnosis.

In June 2013, a unanimous Seventh Circuit restored the claim against Akzo Nobel Paints. The court held that Rule 702 permitted experts to synthesize reliable evidence and disclose their assumptions for cross-examination without requiring a single epidemiological study that duplicated the worker’s precise history.

The ruling established that the absence of a real-time personal-dose record did not make historical exposure legally unknowable. A transparent reconstruction could carry the chemistry of an ordinary shift into a record fit for adversarial testing.

Frieling also helped develop the expert record in Brian Milward’s benzene case. The general-causation analysis drew on five bodies of evidence: benzene’s established relationship to acute myeloid leukemia; the biological relationship among AML subtypes; chromosomal damage associated with benzene; a mechanism involving topoisomerase II inhibition; and epidemiological evidence addressing acute promyelocytic leukemia. In 2011, the First Circuit restored the testimony, holding that a scientific inference could rest on the combined force of multiple bodies of evidence when the expert explained their relationship, addressed uncertainty, and used an accepted weight-of-evidence method informed by the Bradford Hill considerations.

The Grenier Asbestos Verdict

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.

Frieling and Rick Nemeroff represented longtime automobile mechanic Roland Leo Grenier Sr. in Delaware litigation concerning asbestos exposure from brakes and clutches. The trial included pathology, epidemiology, product identification, occupational testimony, the composition of older friction products, and the release of respirable fibers during removal and cleaning. After a three-week trial in 2007 and approximately ten hours of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous $2 million verdict. Jurors assigned 70 percent of the fault to General Motors, 16 percent to Ford, and 2 percent to each of seven additional companies.

General Motors and Ford challenged the admission of Grenier’s causation experts. In February 2009, the Delaware Supreme Court retained jurisdiction and remanded for the trial court to provide a fuller Rule 702 explanation. After the trial court detailed the evidence and expert reasoning and again found the testimony admissible, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed on August 24, 2009.

PCB and Pesticide Results

Frieling and James Piel represented Massachusetts families who alleged that PCBs from a manufacturing site migrated through neighboring property and into their homes. The case drew on environmental samples, household dust, soil, food pathways, blood data, and historical operations. It produced compensation together with residential cleanup and restoration.

PCBs can move through soil, dust, animals, crops, water, and food until exposure is distributed across ordinary daily life. Sampling established locations and ranges; historical records identified sources and timing; toxicology and medicine addressed persistence, absorption, and disease; and residential routines explained how contamination traveled from the site into the home.

Frieling later joined the Philadelphia trial team representing Kelly Martel, who used ready-to-use Roundup at three Pennsylvania properties from 1998 through 2014. Over approximately three weeks, the evidence addressed her pattern of use, glyphosate and the 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 and 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, upholding the Philadelphia venue ruling, the failure-to-warn theory under the preemption law applied in the appeal, the causation evidence, and the punitive award.

Education and Practice

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.

His accounting education is visible in work that depends on quantities, percentages, time periods, allocation, and transparent assumptions. An exposure model is useful only when its inputs can be traced, and each form of relief—from a verdict or judgment to environmental restoration—must be documented with equal precision.

His practice has involved benzene, asbestos, PCBs, dioxin, lead, chromium, arsenic, pesticides, and other industrial substances in state and federal trials and appeals.

Each substance moves differently through work, the environment, and the body. Solvent vapor, friction dust, persistent neighborhood contamination, and sprayed herbicide cannot share one generic exposure theory. The record in each matter must connect product to chemical, chemical to route, route to duration, duration to dose, and dose to the claimed injury while assigning responsibility to the entity tied to that part of the exposure.