Asbestos and Talc Litigation Update 2026

Halfway through 2026, one thing is clear: predictions that asbestos litigation would fade into history remain premature. Filings are climbing, talc claims are surging, and the largest single-plaintiff talc verdict on record is working its way through post-trial motions. Below is a mid-year snapshot of the developments practitioners, insurers, and claimants should have on their radar.

Filings are up, and talc is driving the change

KCIC's 2025 Asbestos Litigation: Year in Review, released in April 2026, remains the closest thing the field has to a national registry, capturing roughly 90% of asbestos-related personal injury complaints filed in the United States. The 2025 data show total filings back at pre-pandemic levels, rising for a third consecutive year, with mesothelioma and lung cancer continuing to account for roughly half and 40% of complaints, respectively.

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The most striking trend is talc. Talc-related filings jumped sharply year over year, and as KCIC's analysts noted at the DRI Asbestos Medicine conference, talc exposure is now alleged in more than 40% of mesothelioma complaints - up from under 5% a decade ago - with roughly 90% of talc trials over the past five years decided for plaintiffs. Jurisdictionally, the familiar leaders (Madison and St. Clair Counties in Illinois, New York City, Philadelphia) held their positions, though coverage of the KCIC report notes momentum shifting toward New York and Philadelphia, and an August 2025 Illinois statute expanding that state's courts' ability to hear asbestos cases may concentrate filings further.

Johnson & Johnson's first full year back in the tort system

The defining structural event of this litigation cycle remains Judge Christopher Lopez's March 31, 2025 dismissal of Red River Talc LLC's prepackaged Chapter 11 - J&J's third and, the company has said, final attempt to channel its talc liabilities through bankruptcy. As Bloomberg Law reported, the court found the proposed multibillion-dollar plan foundered on solicitation and voting irregularities and on third-party release architecture that could not survive Fifth Circuit precedent. J&J announced it would not appeal or refile, returning the claims of what news reports now put at more than 67,000 plaintiffs to the tort system.

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The consequences of a full return to jury trials showed up quickly and dramatically. The headline verdict came in December 2025, when a Baltimore jury awarded more than $1.5 billion - $59.84 million compensatory plus $1.5 billion punitive - to Cherie Craft, a Maryland woman with peritoneal mesothelioma attributed to lifelong use of Johnson's Baby Powder, widely reported as the largest single-plaintiff talc award to date. Days earlier, a Ramsey County, Minnesota jury returned $65.5 million for a 37-year-old mother of three with mesothelioma linked to childhood talc use, as the Associated Press reported, and a Los Angeles jury awarded $40 million to two ovarian cancer plaintiffs - a verdict J&J immediately vowed to appeal, per Reuters.

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Plaintiffs have not had it all their way. In March 2026, a Los Angeles judge struck the $950 million punitive component of the October 2025 verdict for the family of Mae Moore — originally $966 million, among the largest talc awards ever - finding the punitive-damages standard unmet while leaving the jury's causation finding and $16 million in compensatory damages intact, Law.com reported. And June brought a split screen in Los Angeles: a jury awarded $32 million to the family of Maria Lozano in a baby-powder mesothelioma trial just two days after a different jury returned a defense verdict in a coordinated ovarian cancer case. J&J's own securities disclosures capture the mixed record, noting defense verdicts, adverse verdicts, appellate reversals, and selective settlements across the docket.

The MDL's second Daubert round goes (mostly) to plaintiffs

The most consequential pretrial ruling of the year came on January 20, 2026, when retired U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson - who presided over the federal ovarian cancer MDL (MDL 2738, D.N.J.) from 2016 until her 2023 retirement and now serves as special master - issued a 658-page Report and Recommendation to Judge Michael Shipp resolving renewed Rule 702 motions brought after the 2023 amendments to the federal expert-evidence rule. As a detailed analysis in the National Law Review explains, Judge Wolfson largely reaffirmed her 2020 rulings and recommended that most of the roughly 39 proffered experts on both sides be permitted to testify - including plaintiffs' epidemiologists offering the opinion that genital talc use is associated with ovarian cancer - while trimming certain opinions, such as portions of materials scientist Dr. William Longo's PLM-based asbestos findings. With general-causation experts cleared, the MDL's first bellwether trial is moving toward the courtroom.

The Lancet retracts a 49-year-old talc commentary

Science and litigation collided in March, when The Lancet retracted an unsigned 1977 commentary that had concluded normal consumer exposure to cosmetic talc posed no cancer hazard. Public health historians David Rosner (Columbia) and Gerald Markowitz (John Jay College) traced the anonymous piece to Francis J.C. Roe, a paid J&J consultant who, corporate discovery documents show, shared an advance draft with the company and revised it based on its feedback. The journal's editors called the undisclosed relationship a "clear breach of publishing ethics." As Retraction Watch reported, the commentary had been cited for decades in talc defense arguments; plaintiffs' counsel have signaled they intend to raise the retraction at upcoming trials, while J&J disputes that the episode reflects misconduct.

Beyond talc: a landmark premises ruling on the traditional docket

The traditional occupational docket produced the year's most significant state supreme court decision. In Estate of Lorbiecki v. Pabst Brewing Co., 2026 WI 12 (Apr. 15, 2026), the Wisconsin Supreme Court held 5–2 that Pabst could be liable under Wisconsin's safe-place statute for the mesothelioma death of Gerald Lorbiecki, a union steamfitter employed by an independent contractor who cut out asbestos-insulated pipe at the Milwaukee brewery in the 1970s, USA TODAY Network reported. As the State Bar of Wisconsin's case review explains, the court concluded the statute's protections extend to "frequenters," including contractors' employees, where the owner knew of the asbestos hazard - while also recalculating the punitive-damages cap against Pabst's apportioned share of compensatory damages, yielding a final judgment of roughly $7 million. The decision meaningfully strengthens premises-liability theories against property owners in Wisconsin and will be studied in safe-place and frequenter-doctrine jurisdictions elsewhere.

Regulatory backdrop: the chrysotile ban's fate rests with the Fifth Circuit

On the regulatory side, EPA's March 2024 rule banning ongoing uses of chrysotile asbestos — the first risk-management rule finalized under the amended Toxic Substances Control Act — spent 2025 on a rollercoaster. The agency signaled in mid-2025 that it would reconsider the rule, a plan it subsequently abandoned, and the consolidated industry and public-health challenges proceeded, as chronicled in the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization's litigation timeline. Texas Chemistry Council v. EPA (5th Cir. No. 24-60193) was argued on June 1, 2026 - before the same circuit that vacated EPA's 1989 asbestos ban in Corrosion Proof Fittings - and a ruling is pending, with the rule's phase-out deadlines (including the chlor-alkali industry's transition window) remaining in effect in the meantime. Whatever the outcome, the decision will shape future exposure patterns and, decades from now, the tail of this litigation.

The scientific literature courts are reading

The renewed Daubert fight has put recent epidemiology at the center of the docket. Chief among the post-2020 studies is O'Brien et al., Intimate Care Products and Incidence of Hormone-Related Cancers: A Quantitative Bias Analysis, J. Clin. Oncol. 42:2645–2659 (2024), an NIEHS-funded analysis of the 50,884-woman Sister Study cohort that found genital talc use positively associated with ovarian cancer even after modeling recall bias and exposure misclassification - a "consistent association," as the lead author put it. An accompanying JCO editorial situates the finding within pooled case-control analyses showing elevated risk among ever-users of genital powder. Defendants continue to contest causation vigorously - and, as 2026's mixed verdicts show, juries are weighing that dispute case by case.

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