IBM San Jose Plant Workers' Cancer Cases Settled After Bellwether Jury Loss

For decades, workers on the semiconductor manufacturing lines at IBM's San Jose disk-drive plant handled chemicals that included trichloroethylene, benzene, cadmium, arsenic, toluene, and glycol ethers. Many later developed cancers or watched their children born with defects. By 2003, more than 200 similar lawsuits had accumulated against IBM from workers in California, Minnesota, and New York. In California, Richard Alexander of Alexander, Hawes and Audet LLP took on lead counsel responsibilities for a group that would eventually number roughly 250 current and former workers and family members.

The core theory in the California cases was fraudulent concealment. Alexander argued that IBM had tracked employee health outcomes through an internal Corporate Mortality File going back to 1969, that analysis of those records showed cancer rates among workers running two to six times the national averages, and that the company's own doctors had seen signs of chemically linked illness without telling employees. IBM denied any causal link between its manufacturing environment and the workers' conditions.

The first California bellwether trial opened in November 2003 in Santa Clara County Superior Court before Judge Robert Baines. Lead plaintiffs James Moore, 62, who had non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and Alida Hernandez, 73, who had undergone a mastectomy after breast cancer, went before the jury. After approximately four months of proceedings and closing arguments in February 2004, the jury ruled that neither plaintiff had developed systemic chemical poisoning from workplace exposures. The verdict was a setback, but it did not end the litigation.

In June 2004, IBM and the California plaintiffs reached a confidential settlement. Alexander signed the dismissals on behalf of the roughly 50 California workers whose cases were immediately resolved in that wave. The terms were not disclosed by either side. Separate IBM birth-defect cases had already resolved on different tracks: a $40 million settlement in 2001 and a $100 million settlement with plaintiff Candace Curtis in March 2004.

At the time the California cases settled, at least 100 comparable claims against IBM remained pending in New York, Minnesota, and other states. The Network World reporting from October 2003 noted that Alexander's firm was representing hundreds of former IBM workers across those jurisdictions.