Editor's Note: In its July-August issue, the magazine Mother Jones published an article about welding fume litigation. That article did not include any comments from people in the welding industry or lawyers who represent welding consumables manufacturers.

Welding magazine has published numerous articles on welding fumes and the litigation concerning welding fumes, and invited Brandy Bergman to respond to the article.

Bergman, a managing director at the New York-based public relations firm Sard Verbinnen & Co, serves as the spokesperson for a group of welding consumables manufacturers involved in welding fume litigation.

The information presented in the other magazine and the information that Bergman presents here can be checked for veracity in court documents that are public record.

In the court documents as well as in the following response, “plaintiff” refers to the persons and their lawyers who are suing welding electrode companies, while “defendants” refer to the welding electrode companies.

The following is Bergman's response.

The article in Mother Jones written by Jim Morris offers a distorted account of the welding consumable industry and the welding fume litigation.

Rather than conduct an independent, objective investigation, Morris simply accepted as true mischaracterizations by a group of plaintiffs' lawyers who have sought to sue the welding manufacturers — and have been largely unsuccessful.

Notably, other journalists have written stories in far more reputable periodicals, such as the Bloomberg News Wire Service, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine that have exposed plaintiffs' suits as meritless and in some cases, even fraudulent.

The defendants agreed to cooperate with Morris's story, despite his obvious bias; nonetheless, he simply ignored defense counsel's efforts to correct the number of erroneous statements that ultimately were included in the article.

Remarkably, Morris's article ignores the real headlines of the welding fume litigation:

• Defendants have prevailed in 20 out of 23 welding fume trials in the last six years, including the four-plaintiff Andre trial in New Orleans. Morris wrote his story shortly after the Andre verdict was delivered, but pretends as though it never occurred.
• Plaintiffs have been forced to drop five cases they chose for trial because they were caught lying, and two plaintiffs were found to have faked their disabilities. This critical fact is not mentioned at all in the article.
• When the judge responsible for the multiple district litigation over welding fume complaints lifted the lid on plaintiffs' thousands of claims and required them to obtain real medical diagnoses of their conditions, more than half of the cases in the litigation — thousands of claims — evaporated. Although this is one of the most telling facts about the welding fume litigation, it is nowhere to be found in Morris's article.

But Morris's story is not only inaccurate because of his omissions; his representations in the article are false as well.

The welding industry did not spend $12.5 million on studies.

The main premise of Morris's article, that the industry has inappropriately “bought” science, is based on erroneous facts and a false premise.

Morris's suggestion that the industry has acted inappropriately by spending money on epidemiological and other studies is highly disingenuous.

The plaintiffs' attorneys in these suits conducted shoddy “medical” screenings of thousands of welders, pronounced large numbers of them ill, then announced that they had discovered an epidemic that would bring the welding industry down.

Suddenly faced with thousands of lawsuits, the companies obviously needed to defend themselves. That is why they paid to conduct studies — to refute plaintiffs' allegations.

Apparently, Morris believes that plaintiffs' lawyers should be allowed to malign manufacturers but that the defendants should not be allowed to undertake efforts to clear their name.

Morris also fails to note that one of plaintiffs' themes in their trial presentations — almost all of which have resulted in defense verdicts — is that defendants did not spend enough money on studies.

In any event, Morris has his facts wrong, as the defendants in the lawsuits explained to him before the article was published.