Jill A. Rakauski, Frost Law Firm, PC
Wisconsin’s highest court just handed asbestos victims and their families a decision that could matter for a long time, and I wanted to share with you why I feel it’s so important.
In the case of Estate of Carol Lorbiecki v. Pabst Brewing Company, on April 15, 2026, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Pabst can be held liable under Wisconsin’s safe-place law for asbestos exposure suffered by a steamfitter who worked at the company’s Milwaukee brewery in the 1970s while employed by an outside contractor. This upholds the jury’s $26.5 million verdict in principle, while applying statutory limits that significantly narrowed Pabst’s ultimate financial liability.
Pabst argued that Lorbiecki wasn’t its employee, so it shouldn’t be responsible for the unsafe conditions that exposed him to asbestos. The court didn’t buy that, and the majority concluded that Pabst still had a duty to keep the premises safe for “frequenters,” which includes contractor employees working on site.
The facts behind the case are the kind that show up again and again in asbestos litigation, and they’re hard to read without getting a little angry.
Gerald “Jerry” Lorbiecki worked as a steamfitter at the Pabst brewery and was exposed to airborne asbestos while installing and repairing pipe insulation. Decades later, he developed mesothelioma and eventually died from the disease.
Before his death, he sued, alleging that exposure at the brewery was one cause of his illness.
A jury found Pabst liable, awarded compensatory damages, and punitive damages after concluding that the evidence supported a finding of intentional disregard for worker safety.
One of the biggest issues in the opinion was what Pabst knew, and when it knew it.
The majority pointed to evidence that Pabst knew there were “many miles” of asbestos-insulated pipes in the brewery and knew airborne asbestos was a dangerous risk to human health. That evidence helped the court reject the idea that the company could simply point to a contractor relationship and walk away from the consequences of an unsafe workplace.
The court upheld the core liability finding, but it also ruled that the punitive-damages cap had to be based on the compensatory damages recoverable from Pabst itself, not the full compensatory award returned by the jury.
So, the family won on the issue that mattered most, but the justices still adjusted how punitive damages must be calculated.
That may seem like a narrow legal point, but the broader impact of the case is anything but narrow. It’s been noted that the ruling reinforces that, under Wisconsin’s unusual safe‑place statute, property owners can be held responsible for injuries suffered by independent contractors’ employees working on their premises.
That’s why people, especially attorneys like myself, are paying attention to this case.
It pushes back against a defense that shows up repeatedly in industrial injury litigation: the idea that a company can maintain a dangerous worksite and still avoid responsibility because the injured worker technically worked for someone else.
That’s also why this decision lines up so closely with the kind of advocacy that I’ve built my career around.
I moved to Wisconsin in 2004 to focus solely on asbestos cases and have tried many of these cases to large verdicts in the state. I joined Frost Law Firm in 2021. I’ve argued cases in both the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
This is my lane.
And this type of hands-on experience is key because asbestos cases are rarely easy.
They’re usually built on old job histories, long-latency diseases, disputed worksite records, and predictable efforts by corporate defendants to narrow or shift blame.
Cases like Lorbiecki v. Pabst Brewing Company aren’t just about proving that asbestos caused the illness. They’re also about proving who had the duty to prevent the exposure, who knew the risks, and who failed to act anyway. The Supreme Court’s opinion makes it clear that, in Wisconsin, those questions can still be asked of a property owner like Pabst even when the exposed worker came from an outside contractor.
The dissent warned that the ruling could produce a “sea of change” in how similar claims are handled.
Maybe that’s true.
But if anything, that warning highlights how meaningful this decision really is. When a court says a company can’t dodge workplace safety duties just because the harmed worker wasn’t on its own payroll, that is a major shift in leverage.
And frankly, having represented victims and their families since 1993, it’s hard to see that as anything but a long-overdue win for asbestos litigation.
For the families affected, this decision offers something important: a reminder that these cases are still winnable, even when the exposure occurred decades ago, and the defense tries to hide behind fine print and contractor status. For attorneys like myself, this ruling reinforces that Wisconsin remains a serious place for asbestos accountability.
And for companies that still want to treat old industrial asbestos exposure as somebody else’s problem, the message from the Wisconsin Supreme Court was pretty clear:
Not this time.
– Jill
From Exposure to Closure
