Secondary & Household Asbestos Exposure Claims

• Mesothelioma Lawyer in Conshohocken
• What a Mesothelioma Case Is Worth
• Secondary & Household Exposure Claims
• Work History & Exposure Investigation

The Conshohocken plants sat in the middle of the borough rather than out on a industrial edge, which is the detail that matters for household exposure. Men walked home to streets a few blocks from the works, in the clothes they had worked in, and the laundry was done in kitchens and cellars a short distance from the plant gate.

Secondary exposure — take-home exposure — is what happened when asbestos left the plant on somebody's clothes. A worker at Alan Wood Steel, Lee Tire, and the John Wood works finished a shift covered in dust, drove home through Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Bridgeport, and Norristown, and the dust came with him: into the car, onto the porch, into the hamper. Whoever handled that laundry got a concentrated dose, often daily, for years. Frequently that was a wife. Sometimes it was a child who hugged a father in his work clothes.

These claims are legally the same in one respect and different in another. The same, in that the responsibility rests on the companies that made and sold asbestos products they knew to be dangerous. Different, in that the person who got sick has no employment record of their own. Nothing in a personnel file will show it. So the case has to be assembled around the worker's history — his employer, his job title, his years, the products he handled — and then connected to the household routine that carried fiber home.

That means the questions we ask are domestic rather than industrial, and people are sometimes surprised by them. Who did the laundry. Whether the work clothes were washed with everything else. Whether he shook them out on the back step first. Whether he changed at the plant or drove home in them. Whether the same car carried the family on weekends. These ordinary details are, quite literally, the evidence.

The working family member does not need to be alive, and often is not — sometimes he never developed an asbestos disease at all, which throws families off entirely. Neither fact ends the claim. What matters is that his job put asbestos in the house. Conshohocken is in Montgomery County, a short distance from Philadelphia — whose Court of Common Pleas runs a dedicated asbestos program. Venue follows the defendants, and for most Montgomery County histories more than one forum is properly available.

Time limits apply and generally run from the diagnosis rather than from the exposure, which was often decades earlier. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — fees and costs in Conshohocken

No fee unless there is a recovery. Any fee is a percentage agreed in writing before representation begins.

Secondary & Household Exposure Claims — questions, answered