Mark G. Strauss

Strauss attended Washington University School of Law from 1984 to 1987. After law school, he remained in the Midwest, where asbestos litigation became an important part of his early legal career.

As a young lawyer, he attended hundreds of asbestos depositions and was assigned to monitor asbestos trials in Madison and St. Clair Counties, Illinois. The work immersed him in litigation involving diseases that often appeared decades after the exposures that caused them.

It also introduced him to a problem that would follow him throughout his professional life: how do you reconstruct an exposure that occurred decades ago?

Asbestos cases demanded far more than knowing where someone had worked. They required investigation into what that person actually did, what other trades were working nearby, what products were being installed, repaired or removed, who manufactured and supplied those products, what the products contained, and during what years they were present.

Those early years in the Midwest provided the foundation for a broader understanding of occupational asbestos exposure and historical product identification.

Strauss subsequently worked on the Georgine asbestos class action. That work broadened the range of asbestos exposures he encountered across occupations, industries and workplaces.

He later helped try asbestos cases involving workers from many different trades. Among them were electricians, whose exposures could involve asbestos-containing arc chutes, Bakelite electrical components, wire, cable and other electrical materials. His work also involved the exposure histories of operating engineers, plasterers, tile setters and insulators, among others.

Each trade presented a different investigative problem. An electrician's history might require identifying components inside electrical equipment. A plasterer's history could turn on the composition of materials mixed or applied decades earlier. A tile setter's work raised questions about setting materials and other products used in installation. An operating engineer might have encountered asbestos through machinery, equipment or surrounding trades. An insulator's history presented still another set of products and manufacturers.

The accumulation of those cases gave Strauss a perspective that could not be obtained from studying a single industry or product category. Asbestos was not one product, one trade or one type of workplace. It appeared in thousands of applications, sometimes in places that workers themselves would never have recognized as containing asbestos.

In 1996, Strauss became a principal in his own law firm. For the next 17 years, through 2013, he continued representing people and families affected by asbestos-related disease. Over those years, one aspect of the work increasingly captured his attention: product identification.

The problem is inherent in mesothelioma litigation. A diagnosis may occur 30, 40 or even 50 years after the relevant exposure. By then, factories may have closed. Contractors may no longer exist. Products may have disappeared from the market. Manufacturers may have changed names, merged or entered bankruptcy. The people who purchased the materials may be gone.

And memory has limits.

A worker may remember installing a cable but not its manufacturer. He may remember opening an electrical panel but not the company that molded an internal component. He may remember mixing a powder without remembering the name on the bag. He may vividly remember the work while having had no reason, decades earlier, to notice the manufacturer of the material that created the dust.

That is where historical product research becomes important.

Strauss developed a sustained interest in reconstructing those missing pieces: identifying products from old catalogs and descriptions, examining historical product literature, studying corporate and supplier records, and determining when particular products were manufactured, what they contained and where they were sold.

The objective was not research for its own sake. It was to answer the question that had been present since his earliest asbestos cases: What was actually there?

After 2013, Strauss stepped away from the day-to-day practice of law for a period and devoted substantial time to charitable efforts. He later resumed and substantially expanded his historical research into asbestos products and product identification.

The work grew beyond conventional asbestos products. His research increasingly examined talc and vermiculite, including their historical use in manufactured products and the relationships among raw-material suppliers, product manufacturers, distributors and end users.

That broader investigation reflected something Strauss had learned from decades of asbestos cases: the company whose name appeared on a finished product was not necessarily the beginning of the story.

Understanding an exposure can require tracing a material through an entire chain—from the company that mined or supplied a raw material, to the manufacturer that incorporated it into another product, to a distributor or equipment manufacturer, and ultimately to the worker who encountered it.

The research therefore became increasingly concerned not simply with products, but with the historical relationships among materials, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, workplaces and trades.