Lockheed Litigation

In the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, many of the nation's largest chemical manufacturers supplied their products to Lockheed's supersecret "Skunkworks" facility in Burbank, California where under strict security Lockheed constructed some of the nation's most sophisticated military aircraft, including the SR 71 Blackbird. The chemical manufacturers could not know how their products were being used.

More than 600 former workers at the Skunkworks sued many of the chemical manufacturers for injuries they claimed from exposure to chemicals used at the Lockheed workplace.

Back-to-back trials of the workers' claims proceeded in Los Angeles Superior Court. When the verdicts began piling up against them, the defendants asked Horvitz & Levy LLP for help. The appellate court rebuffed the defendants three times on appeal. But in the fourth and fifth appeals, where the jury awarded punitive damages for the first time, Horvitz & Levy LLP persuaded the appellate court to overturn judgments totaling over $760 million and to find that as a matter of law plaintiffs had failed to prove any grounds for recovering punitive damages. (Click here to see an article that appeared in The Recorder regarding the litigation.)

In two subsequent appeals, the Court of Appeal affirmed the exclusion of plaintiffs' expert testimony on general causation as speculative and unreliable, and upheld the dismissal of plaintiffs' claims. (Click here to read about our success in the second of these cases.) In 2005, the California Supreme Court granted review of one of these cases in order to determine what the standard for admitting expert testimony should be in California. (Click here to read about the grant of review.)

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