Lawyers’ attack ads doom bills

The strategy of using full-page newspaper ads to pressure three state senators apparently has backfired on a group of lawyers who were trying to change the Washington laws that apply to asbestos liability lawsuits.

Senate Bill 5964, the measure that would have made the sought-after changes, is now dead – retaliation for what Sens. Jim Kastama, Mary Margaret Haugen and Jim Hargrove and many of their colleagues considered attack ads that went over the top.

The advertisements suggested the trio were denying justice to families of people who died from exposure to asbestos and accused Kastama, D-Puyallup; Haugen, D-Camano Island; and Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, of blocking passage of the bill. The advertisements ran in several newspapers in the legislative districts of the three senators – The News Tribune, The Olympian, The (Snohomish County) Herald and The (Aberdeen) Daily World – and cost tens of thousand of dollars.

The targeted senators lay most of the blame on a former colleague, Brian Weinstein, a Mercer Island lawyer who until December had been a Democratic senator representing King County’s Eastside communities. Weinstein is now a member of Bergman Draper & Frockt, the Seattle law firm that paid for the ads and which has been lobbying for passage of the bill.

“In four years, he (Weinstein) never really learned a thing about how this place works,” Sen. Brian Hatfield, D-Raymond, said Saturday. Hatfield supported a couple of changes that Kastama and Haugen wanted to make to the original bill, changes that Weinstein’s firm did not want.

How “this place” works is this: Not only did the senators kill SB 5964, but also they killed the so-called Homeowners Bill of Rights, a measure that Weinstein had championed for most of the term in the Legislature and which he nearly got passed. It passed the Senate but died in the House.

The News Tribune tried to contact Weinstein on Thursday, but his law office referred a reporter to the public relations firm of Mark Firmani in Seattle.

The statewide trial lawyers association, now called the Washington State Justice Association, tried to distance itself from the attack ads.

“We are writing on behalf of our organization to express our sincere regret for the advertisements in your papers regarding your alleged positions on Senate Bill 5964,” the president, past president and two lobbyists for the trial lawyers wrote in a letter Friday to the three senators. “In our 20-plus years as an organization of being heavily involved with the legislative process, we have never used this tactic, and we disavow it.”

It was too late to salvage the asbestos litigation bill.

“My caucus is totally outraged,” Haugen said Friday after receiving the letter. “The bills are terminal – dead.”

Larry Shannon, a lobbyist for the statewide group of attorneys, said the original bill sought to fix what trial lawyers considered a bad ruling by the Washington Supreme Court in December. In the Simonetta case, the court ruled that a company that made turbine engines for the Bremerton Naval Shipyards was not liable for the asbestos injuries that arose after another company used asbestos to insulate the engines because that company did not manufacture the asbestos or use it, he said.

“The law since 1967 said a product manufacturer has a duty to warn of the known dangers associated with the use of the product,” Shannon said. The word “associated” is key, he said. “The turbine engine manufacturer knew their product had to be insulated with an asbestos lining even though they did not put it in.”

SB 5964 would have made it clear that such companies are indeed liable if they failed to warn employees of the dangers of asbestos and could be blamed for the lung disease mesothelioma that exposure to asbestos caused. The bill also would have been retroactive, which would have allowed the case to be revived.

Kastama had sponsored an amendment to get rid of the retroactive provision, as well as language that would have made companies liable because “they should have reasonably anticipated that asbestos would be added to its products.”

Kastama said it appeared the bill would have created a new set of companies to sue – companies with money – because most, if not all, of the original asbestos manufacturers are bankrupt because of previous lawsuits and class action settlements.

The ad in The News Tribune, which cost about $10,000, asked, “Why is Senator Kastama blocking this important legislation designed to help those working men and women sick and dying from asbestos exposure?”

The Bergman, Draper & Frockt firm said it ran the ads on behalf of a client, whose husband died at age 57 after a “horribly painful illness” after exposure to asbestos while working in the Bremerton shipyards.

Before he moved to Washington, Weinstein was a plaintiff’s lawyer in Texas and specialized is asbestos litigation. He told reporters earlier in this legislative session that he was not doing any lobbying at the Legislature, but lawmakers later told reporters he was.

Haugen sent a letter to the editor to The (Snohomish County) Herald and the Skagit Valley Herald newspapers that carried the full-page ads attacking her, saying, “This very expensive undertaking is simply a heavy-handed attempt by a law firm to influence legislation that would benefit their clients, who are plaintiffs in asbestos-related lawsuits. It even featured a generic, stock photo of a pipe fitter at Bremerton Naval Shipyard in a blatant attempt to elicit sympathy from the reader.”

It’s unclear why any of the ads were aimed at Hargrove. Hargrove said he was co-sponsor of the original bill and had not yet made up his mind about whether to sign onto Kastama’s amendments.

Joseph Turner: 253-597-8436

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