Washington--Attorneys at a business conference here today urged companies and their insurers to counter class action suits over silicosis or asbestosis injuries with comprehensive studies that can reveal patterns of claim fraud.

According to lawyers speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform in Washington, the scales of credibility are tilting away from plaintiffs' attorneys and their "diagnosis mills" in these mass tort cases, and defendant attorneys should press the issue.

They said lawyers for companies under attack can help their own cause by compiling and analyzing the full medical data involved in these cases that can show negligent or fraudulent activities.

Plaintiffs' attorneys have been using these practices, which Institute President Lisa Rickard called an "insulting exploitation of our judicial system," to build mass torts for asbestos related diseases, and are now beginning to apply the same methods to areas such as silica-related diseases and diseases arising from exposure to welding rod fumes.

In recent months, however, plaintiffs have suffered some setbacks, most notable in federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas, where U.S. District Judge Janis Graham Jack harshly criticized the methods used by trial lawyers to solicit claims in a mass tort involving silica.

Fred Krutz, a partner in the firm of Forman Perry Watkins Krutz and Tardy, LLP, based in Jackson, Miss., and a member of the defense team in the Texas case, called the judge's order "unprecedented and historic," with ramifications that "will be felt for a long time, not only in silicosis, but in asbestosis and other mass tort litigation."

Much of the reason for the judge's order, Mr. Krutz said, was the defense's thorough investigation of the diagnoses claimed by the plaintiffs in the case.

Through their examination of the documents used for diagnoses, Mr. Krutz said the defense team found that many of the diagnoses had been made with the goal of finding a claim.

In fact, Mr. Krutz noted, the plaintiffs' attorneys in the case had seemingly made use of earlier cases involving asbestos exposure. Roughly 65 percent of the patients diagnosed with silicosis in the mass tort case had also been diagnosed earlier with asbestosis, an occurrence so unlikely that Judge Jack equated it to a golfer hitting a hole in one, Mr. Krutz related.

Mr. Krutz had sought to have the case moved from state court in Mississippi to the federal district court, and while Judge Jack ultimately ruled that the case should be returned to the state system, he said the criticism of the plaintiff's practices in her scathing, 249 page order would be a valuable asset going forward. "The mass screenings, I predict to you, are over," he said.

Much of what Mr. Krutz and his associates were able to accomplish he credited to their idea to catalog all of the medical files in the case into a database.

That system was able to cross-reference different pieces of data and help them determine such figures as the number of patients diagnosed by a particular doctor or the number of patients diagnosed in a particular time period.

A similar project has begun to create a larger database of doctors, attorneys and screeners who perform the basic tests to establish diagnoses for mass torts. Timothy O'Reilly, a consultant with the Institute for Legal Reform, said the project would help defense attorneys to establish a "level playing field" in such cases.

Mr. O'Reilly added that the desired outcome would be a large Web-based database that could help attorneys nationwide determine if the mass tort action they are facing is the result of attorneys who actively seek out claimants regardless of their health. "The ultimate goal is to have a national database," he said.

Mr. O'Reilly said that the current legal environment, in which several states have passed or are considering legislation requiring those filing lawsuits for injuries related to asbestos or silica exposure to meet specific medical criteria, is favorable to defense attorneys.

"I can't remember a time when we've had this momentum," he said, adding that it "behooves" defendants and their attorneys to act on that momentum.

Dave Setter, a founding shareholder of the Denver-based law firm of Socha, Perczak, Setter and Anderson, P.C., echoed Mr. O'Reilly's sentiments, adding that defense attorneys should "take it to them" when they find that mass tort claims were the result of diagnostic mills. "We have the momentum, so don't quit now," he said. "Whenever these occur, we should go forward."