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Erin Beachum

Erin defends clients in toxic tort and product liability matters.

Erin first came to the legal industry as a paralegal and quickly realized that the field would be an excellent fit for her love of writing and public speaking. However, what she enjoyed most about her paralegal role was simply working with clients: Erin loved getting to know their businesses and observing how the firm worked to customize legal strategies to fit individual client goals. Enthusiastic about the opportunity to work more directly with clients and help them get to where they wanted to be, Erin enrolled in law school.

As a law student, Erin soon discovered that she was especially fascinated by her tort classes. She knew mass tort would be a practice area applicable to a wide variety of clients and businesses, and she contributed to product liability research during her summer associateship at Husch Blackwell. Today, Erin represents clients in both mass tort and product liability litigation and particularly enjoys getting to know each individual client’s business.

Many of the matters Erin works on take place in highly contentious Illinois venues for toxic tort cases, allowing her to draw on her experience as a judicial extern in Cook County. Erin’s externship gave her the opportunity to work directly with a Cook County judge, getting a full perspective on how courts work and observing the interplay between judges and attorneys. She also draws on her award-winning work in law school moot court, where she learned to think quickly on her feet and to know her argument backwards and forwards.

At the end of a case, Erin wants clients to be confident that she’s done everything in her power to fight for them.

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In a recent case filed in Portland, OR, a 71-year-old man brought various claims against numerous defendants related to products liability, negligence, and failure to warn associated with asbestos-containing products after being diagnosed with biphasic pleural mesothelioma in 2023. The case, Richard D. Long v. 3M Company, et al., was pending in the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon for Multnomah County. The initial trial ended in a mistrial after four days of jury deliberation. The subsequent trial resulted in the Portland jury awarding $34,200,000 to the plaintiff on
September 5, 2025.

In a recent case pending in Hawaii state court, a husband and wife sued a tobacco company defendant for various claims related to its manufacturing and marketing of tobacco cigarettes, including strict products liability, negligence, fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, conspiracy, and loss of consortium. After more than a month-long trial, the defendant was found responsible for design defect, fraud, and conspiracy claims related to plaintiff’s laryngeal cancer. The case, pending in the Third Judicial District of Hawaii, resulted in an eyewatering $91 million dollar verdict for the plaintiffs.

On July 7, 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Eduardo C. Robreno, who oversees the asbestos multi district litigation (MDL 875) in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, applied a new standard set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court in Air & Liquid Sys. Corp. v. DeVries, 139 S. Ct. 986 (2019) in granting summary judgment for two turbine defendants accused of causing the decedent’s asbestos-related disease. Defendants General Electric (GE) and CBS Corporation (CBS) allegedly incorporated asbestos-containing components on their products to which the decedent was later exposed.