The Legal Defense That Blames Asbestos Victims for Their Own Cancer
A pipe manufacturer spent decades selling asbestos cement pipe without adequate warnings. When a dying man sued, its lawyers argued he was too experienced to deserve protection. A California appeals court agreed.
The company that originally manufactured and sold JMM’s asbestos cement pipe, Johns-Manville, was destroyed by asbestos injury lawsuits. JMM bought those very same pipe-making assets, kept selling the product, and then successfully argued in court that the man who got cancer cutting it should have known better.
The Setup: A Company Built on a Known Killer’s Leftovers
In 1983, Johns-Manville collapsed under the weight of thousands of asbestos injury lawsuits. The company knew its products caused cancer and had concealed that knowledge for decades. Out of that wreckage, two new companies emerged: J-M/AC, which manufactured asbestos cement pipe, and J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. (JMM), which sold it exclusively and also held responsibility for health and safety at both operations.
Kirt Bjoin had been laying pipe since he was a teenager in the late 1970s, working summers for his father’s construction company in Southern California. By 1981, he was working full-time. By 1983, his father had vanished, leaving Bjoin to manage the remaining jobs, the equipment, and the crew. By 1984, he and a partner formally incorporated their own pipe-laying business, Bevilacqua & Bjoin (B&B).
Throughout this period, Bjoin regularly cut JMM’s asbestos cement pipe with a power saw. He testified the cuts produced enormous quantities of dust. He testified he never wore a respirator. He testified he never saw a warning label on JMM’s pipe. He did not learn that asbestos cement pipe was hazardous until the mid-1990s. In 2021, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Timeline: Key Events in Bjoin v. JMM
The Pipe Did What Pipe Does. The Dust Did What Asbestos Does.
Bjoin’s case was straightforward: JMM knew its asbestos cement pipe released hazardous dust when cut with a power saw, JMM failed to put adequate warnings on the pipe, and Bjoin developed lung cancer as a direct result of breathing that dust for years without protection. The jury found that Bjoin’s exposure to JMM’s asbestos cement pipe was, in fact, “a substantial factor in risk of developing lung cancer.” They accepted that fact. Then they let the company walk away anyway.
JMM deployed two affirmative defenses. The first: Bjoin was a “sophisticated user” who already knew, or should have known, that cutting asbestos cement pipe with a power saw was dangerous. Therefore, JMM never needed to warn him in the first place. The second: using a power saw to cut the pipe was such an extraordinary misuse of the product that JMM could not possibly have foreseen it. Therefore, Bjoin’s own behavior was the “sole cause” of his cancer.
“The jury specifically found in favor of JMM on its sophisticated user and product misuse affirmative defenses… The jury also found in favor of JMM on Bjoin’s cause of action for general negligence.”
Read that combination slowly. The company argued simultaneously that Bjoin should have known cutting the pipe with a power saw was dangerous, AND that cutting the pipe with a power saw was so bizarre and unforeseeable that it counted as a freak accident. Both of those arguments cannot logically be true at the same time. A California jury accepted both of them anyway.
The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Cannot Measure
Human Cost DocumentedKirt Bjoin started working pipe jobs as a child, spending summers alongside his father. He was a teenager learning a trade, not a credentialed industrial hygienist. By age sixteen, he was laying pipe. By his early twenties, he was running jobs and directing crews after his father vanished without explanation, leaving behind equipment, unfinished contracts, and the unspoken expectation that Kirt would hold it together. He did. He built a business. He worked for decades in the trades.
In 2021, after more than forty years in the industry, Bjoin learned he had lung cancer. He and his wife Allison filed suit. By the time the case went to trial, nine of the ten defendants had already been resolved. Only three remained. Then, during jury deliberations, one more settled. Bjoin faced JMM essentially alone at the finish line, with a terminal diagnosis and a legal system that was about to tell him the company owed him nothing.
The jury confirmed that JMM’s asbestos cement pipe substantially contributed to Bjoin’s risk of developing lung cancer. Then the jury found JMM was not negligent. That is the American legal system working exactly as corporations designed it to work.
The “sophisticated user” defense did not just defeat Bjoin’s legal claims. It did something more corrosive: it turned Bjoin’s own working-class competence against him. Because he eventually ran his own small business, because he learned the trade and took on responsibility, because he was good at his job, JMM argued he forfeited his right to be warned about dangers that could kill him. The defense effectively punishes workers for professional growth. Stay ignorant and uninformed, or lose your rights in court.
Allison Bjoin is listed as a plaintiff “individually and as personal representative.” That designation carries enormous legal weight and almost no emotional one. It means she was already grieving during these proceedings, or preparing to. It means this case was about more than one person’s lung cancer. It was about a family watching a corporation escape accountability for a preventable disease, using arguments sophisticated enough to confuse a jury but cynical enough to enrage anyone who stops to think about them. When Bjoin and his partner wound down their company in the early 1990s, they threw all the business records in a dumpster. Bjoin had no documents at trial. The man who got cancer had no paper trail. The company that sold him the cancer-causing product had an army of lawyers from at least four law firms.
Johns-Manville: The Ghost Behind JMM
The most damning context in this entire case is a single sentence buried in the appellate record: “Johns-Manville later went out of business due to asbestos injury lawsuits.” Johns-Manville did not go out of business because it made a bad product no one wanted. It went bankrupt because it knowingly sold asbestos products to workers and concealed the health hazards for decades. Tens of thousands of workers were harmed. The lawsuits finally caught up with the company.
JMM then bought the pipe division from that bankrupt company. It inherited the manufacturing infrastructure, the customer relationships, the supply chains, and the business model. What it did not inherit, apparently, was any obligation to warn the workers cutting that pipe about what the dust could do to their lungs. JMM was specifically designated as “responsible for health and safety at both companies” from the moment it was founded in 1983. The court record says so explicitly. JMM accepted the profit. JMM accepted the “health and safety” responsibility. When the health consequences arrived forty years later in the form of a dying pipe layer, JMM argued its way out of accountability by calling the dying man too experienced to deserve protection.
Legal Receipts: In Their Own Words
Verbatim Source Material“The jury first found that Bjoin was exposed to asbestos from AC pipe supplied by JMM and Ferguson. It also found that his exposure from JMM’s AC pipe was a substantial factor in risk of developing lung cancer, but his exposure from Ferguson’s AC pipe was not.”
Court Record, Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. — Jury Findings“Under the sophisticated user defense, a manufacturer is not liable to a sophisticated user of its product for failure to warn about the product’s dangers if the sophisticated user knew or should have known of the dangers.”
Court Record, citing Johnson v. American Standard, Inc. (2008)“Although manufacturers are responsible for products that contain dangers of which the public is unaware, they are not insurers, even under strict liability, for the mistakes or carelessness of consumers who should know of the dangers involved.”
Court Record, citing Johnson v. American Standard, quoting the California Supreme Court’s rationale for adopting the sophisticated user defense“The jury finding [on product misuse] found the use of a power saw to cut or bevel AC pipe was so highly extraordinary that it was not reasonably foreseeable to defendants, and therefore should be considered as the sole cause of Bjoin’s injuries.”
Court Record, Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. — Jury Special Verdict Summary“JMM was also responsible for health and safety at both companies. This founding in 1983 marks the beginning of JMM’s liability in this action.”
Court Record, Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. — Background Section“Stone’s testimony was that he stopped using a power saw in 1979 and the use of power saws to cut AC pipe essentially stopped after 1980 or 1981.”
Court Record, Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing Company, Inc. — JMM’s construction expert Michael Stone, cited by the appellate court in discussing the product misuse defenseJMM’s own expert testified that power saw use to cut asbestos pipe “essentially stopped” by 1980 or 1981. Bjoin testified he used a power saw to cut JMM pipe through 1988. The jury found his behavior was so unusual it was unforeseeable. So why did JMM’s own materials still exist to be cut in the mid-1980s?
By the Numbers: The Anatomy of a Corporate Defense
Defendants vs. Outcomes: Who Walked and Who Settled
Societal Impact Mapping: Who Else Gets Hurt
Public Health: Precedent Is the Real Weapon
Systemic RiskThe appellate court certified this opinion for publication on August 25, 2025. That single administrative decision transforms a loss for one man into a weapon against an entire class of workers. Published California appellate opinions become precedent. Every asbestos manufacturer, every chemical company, every industrial product maker whose materials hurt workers can now cite Bjoin v. J-M Manufacturing to argue that their injured workers were “sophisticated users” who assumed the risk.
The population of workers most exposed to asbestos cement pipe includes pipe layers, plumbers, water and sewer workers, and construction crews. These are overwhelmingly working-class and trade workers, people who learn by doing, who develop expertise through years of physical labor rather than through formal safety training or access to corporate health and safety research. The “sophisticated user” defense specifically targets this class of worker: the more experience you have in the trades, the more knowledge the law imputes to you, and the less corporations owe you.
Asbestos-related diseases, including mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer, have a latency period of 20 to 50 years. Workers cutting asbestos cement pipe in the 1980s are only now receiving their diagnoses. The legal window for accountability was already narrow. This published decision narrows it further. Every worker who cut asbestos cement pipe with a power saw in the 1980s, who is now in their 60s or 70s and beginning to develop symptoms, faces the same “sophisticated user” argument. The court just handed corporate defense teams a loaded gun and published the ammunition count.
Economic Inequality: Four Law Firms vs. One Dying Man
Power ImbalanceJMM entered this trial represented by attorneys from at least four separate law firms: Manning Gross & Massenburg, Miller Barondess, and Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, with multiple named partners from each. Bjoin was represented by Weitz & Luxenberg, a firm that specializes in asbestos cases, so he had capable representation. But the structural advantage JMM carried into that courtroom extended far beyond attorney headcount.
When Bjoin and his business partner wound down their company around 1990, they threw all their paper records into a dumpster. Bjoin had no B&B company documents at trial. No records of what pipe he ordered, from whom, in what quantities, on what dates. JMM, by contrast, had internal memoranda, industry records, regulatory communications, and decades of corporate documentation available to its legal team. The man with lung cancer showed up to court with his memory. The company showed up with an archive.
The court record notes that Bjoin’s Social Security records showed he was paid cash “under the table” during parts of his work history, after his father disappeared and before B&B was formally incorporated. Cash payments, no records, no formal employment documentation. This is the economic reality of working-class labor in the construction trades. Corporations use that informality against workers in court. The absence of documentation that working people never had resources to create becomes evidence of their inadequacy as plaintiffs.
The “Cost of a Life” Metric
What JMM Avoided Paying
$0JMM paid zero dollars in damages to Kirt Bjoin or his family. The jury found the company not negligent, awarded no compensation for a terminal cancer diagnosis linked by the jury itself to JMM’s asbestos cement pipe.
The predecessor company, Johns-Manville, was bankrupted by asbestos lawsuits. JMM bought the business, kept selling the pipe, and structured a legal defense that its own predecessor could not survive.
The Exposure Window: Years of Unwarned Risk
~7 YearsBjoin cut JMM’s asbestos cement pipe most frequently from 1983 to 1985, and across a broader window from 1978 to 1988. Approximately 7 years of documented, heavy exposure to asbestos dust, generating what Bjoin described as “a large quantity of dust” with every cut. No respirator. No warning label. No disclosure from the manufacturer that owned health and safety responsibility for the product.
Forty years later, a terminal cancer diagnosis. A jury found the exposure “a substantial factor in risk of developing lung cancer” and still awarded nothing.
What Now: Where to Push Back
Action WatchlistThe corporate roles that matter here are straightforward: JMM’s leadership accepted the designation of “responsible for health and safety at both companies” when the business was founded in 1983. Whoever held that title made decisions about warning labels, product safety communications, and worker notification. Those decisions created the conditions for Kirt Bjoin’s cancer. The court record does not name those individuals, but their corporate successors operate a business that just won a landmark precedent-setting case.
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