What Are Asbestos Trust Funds and How Do They Work?

In the asbestos litigation, it's far more common for, an individual with a lawsuit to have several defendants that the lawyers intend to resolve and settle the case with or go to trial against, and also to have a various claims against bankruptcy trust. Now, I wanna talk about bankruptcy trust for a minute. There is a big misunderstanding about this fund that's out there for mesothelioma victims. And the reason that there's a mis understanding is because of television advertising, which just says, Hey. If you've been diagnosed with mesothelioma, there's a fund available. There's thirty billion dollars Call today. That's designed to get people to call. It's not designed to be as informative as possible. What asbestos dot com will do is they will explain to you that it's not one huge fund. That's just advertising on television. There are a whole bunch of companies. Let's just call it fifty for the sake of this conversation that have filed for bankruptcy under a very special code. In the bankruptcy code, it's called five twenty four G. It's part of the statute. It allows for companies with asbestos liabilities to reorganize, set aside money, and go on with their, corporate life, without having to be sued anymore. Alright. And this has been in the news a lot with Johnson and Johnson and certain other companies recently who have kind of been trying to gain the system and take advantage of it, because they were not really in financial distress. They really just wanted a way out of these companies are individual companies. They set up their own trust. They have their own trust distribution procedures. And When you are a plaintiff or we are your lawyer together, our job is to try to get you to qualify for that trust if we believe that you worked with the products that were associated with, the brand name trade name or manufacturer name that's part of that. Trust. Okay. So each of these bankruptcy trusts is individual. It's not one fund. I often tell clients you don't take your diagnosis and put it in the machine and cash shoots out the way that they make you believe on TV. It's not an ATM situation.