A legal scholar hired by attorneys suing asbestos manufacturer W.R. Grace says that the company might owe victims of its asbestos products as much as $6.2 billion.

According to a Bloomberg News article published in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post, Columbia, Md.-based W.R. Grace and Company “may need to spend from $4.7 billion to $6.2 billion to resolve hundreds of thousands of asbestos cases over several decades,” says Mark A. Peterson, a research scientist with the Rand Corporation.

“Because Grace continued to make and sell asbestos products after other defendants quit, it now faces greater and longer-extending asbestos liability than other defendants,” Peterson said in papers filed June 20th in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

Grace also hired a consultant earlier this year to help determine their liability. That company, Analysis Research Planning Corp. of Washington, D.C., came up with a significantly lower number than the one Peterson determined. They placed the net present value of pending and future claims in the range of between $385 million and $1.3 billion through 2049.

In the face of 135,000 asbestos claims, Grace filed bankruptcy in 2001. Early next year, a trial will be held to set a value on the claims. The trial, the article points out, will be a major step towards completion of the company’s six-year-old reorganization attempts.

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