Asbestos Claims Data Retention Probed by Top Delaware Court (1)

Johnson & Johnson and other companies that commonly face litigation over cancer-causing asbestos argued Wednesday there’s no time to lose in their challenge to a plan to delete older data compiled from claims against them.

If a group of settlement trusts handling those claims implements a policy to delete data over a year old, “we face the imminent destruction of vast amounts of information that’s critical to our defense of thousands of cases,” one of the companies’ attorneys, C. Kevin Marshall of Jones Day, told the Delaware Supreme Court.

The trusts want Delaware’s highest court to allow them to exit ...