Filing a mesothelioma lawsuit starts with two building blocks: a confirmed diagnosis and a work history that identifies where the asbestos exposure happened. Once those are in place, your lawyer files a complaint in the right court. In Pennsylvania that is often the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, which has run a dedicated asbestos program since 1986 (In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001). You do not need to know which companies are responsible before you call. Identifying them is the lawyer’s job.
What you need before a case can be filed
Less than most families assume. The starting materials are:
- Medical records confirming the mesothelioma diagnosis, usually including the pathology report.
- A work history: employers, job sites, trades, and rough dates. Union records and Social Security earnings statements help fill gaps.
- Military service records, if the exposure may have happened during service.
- Anything your loved one said about dusty work, old products, or conditions at plants and shipyards. Details that seem small often matter.
You do not need product names or proof of which company made the insulation on a specific job. Decades of asbestos litigation have built a record of which products were used where, and an investigation matches your history against it. Asbestos exposure is the primary cause of mesothelioma, and the disease typically appears 20 to 50 years after exposure (National Cancer Institute asbestos fact sheet), so the jobs that matter are usually the ones from decades ago.
How to file a mesothelioma lawsuit, step by step
- Talk to a lawyer and sign a representation agreement. Our firm handles mesothelioma cases on a contingency fee basis: no hourly bills and no upfront cost, with the fee paid out of a recovery.
- Investigation. Your legal team gathers employment, union, and military records, interviews coworkers, and matches your job sites against the product evidence from prior asbestos litigation.
- Filing the complaint. The complaint is the document that opens the lawsuit. It names the defendant companies and states the claims against each one.
- Discovery. Both sides exchange records and written answers. This is where the exposure case gets built formally.
- Your deposition. Recorded testimony under oath, usually taken somewhere comfortable rather than a courtroom. In mesothelioma cases it happens early, because Pennsylvania Rule of Civil Procedure 4020 allows a deposition to be used at trial if the witness later cannot testify. Your account gets preserved.
- Resolution. Defendants tend to resolve separately, some by settlement and some at trial. A case is often a series of resolutions rather than one event.
Where are mesothelioma lawsuits filed in Pennsylvania?
In a Court of Common Pleas. Venue rules decide which county’s court can hear a particular case, and that is a call your lawyer makes based on the facts, not something you need to work out in advance.
Philadelphia deserves its own mention. The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas has operated a dedicated asbestos program since 1986 under the caption In re: Asbestos Litigation, No. 1986-00001, and Michael Schafle is counsel in that docket. Not every Pennsylvania case is filed in Philadelphia. For the ones that are, it is a court we work in regularly.
What deadline applies?
Two years, generally. Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations gives you two years, generally from discovery of the injury at diagnosis (42 Pa. C.S. § 5524). For families filing after a death, the period is generally two years from the death, through wrongful death and survival actions under 42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8301-8302. Our Pennsylvania statute of limitations page explains how the discovery rule sets the start date. The safe course is simple: treat the diagnosis date as day one.
Does filing a lawsuit mean going to court?
Filing a lawsuit does not commit you to a courtroom. Many claims resolve through negotiated settlements, and asbestos trust claims are handled outside of court entirely, through an administrative process. If a trial is ever genuinely on the table, that decision gets made with you, not for you. What the filing does is preserve your rights before the two-year deadline arrives and put your case on the court’s calendar. How long each stage tends to run, and what speeds it up, is covered on our lawsuit timeline page.
What this means for your family
The work of filing falls on the legal team, not on the patient. Your part is a phone call, some records you already have or that we can order, and your memories. The rest, from the investigation through the complaint and every mesothelioma lawsuit stage after it, is our job to carry.
When you are ready, a free case review will tell you whether a case can be filed and what filing it would look like.