The case arose from the death of Stephen M. Dodge, who was diagnosed with malignant peritoneal mesothelioma in 2011 and died in 2012. Dodge had been exposed to asbestos both at home — through grinding wheels, joint compounds, drywall, and insulation used during his childhood and early adulthood — and at work, including a summer job as a custodian for the town of Manchester and a thirty-year career as an analyst at the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles headquarters in Wethersfield, a building the commission found to contain asbestos material and elevated concentrations of asbestos fibers in the air.
His wife, Elizabeth M. Dodge, acting as executrix of his estate and in her personal capacity, settled product liability actions against manufacturers and suppliers of asbestos-containing products, generating gross proceeds of $522,424.30. Of that total, only $31,500 was attributed to occupational exposure; $490,924.30 was attributed to nonoccupational exposure. After fees and expenses, the net recovery was $337,048.71, with 70 percent — $235,934.10 — going to the estate for the decedent's personal injuries and death, and 30 percent — $101,114.61 — going to the plaintiff personally for loss of consortium. The Workers' Compensation Commission also awarded the estate total incapacity benefits of $41,061.71 (a figure reached by stipulation following this court's intervening decision in Cochran v. Dept. of Transportation, 350 Conn. 844 (2024)), a funeral allowance of $4,000, and the plaintiff weekly survivor's benefits totaling $822,192.29 through the date of the commission's 2024 decision.
The central dispute was whether the employers — the state of Connecticut and the town of Manchester — could assert a statutory lien on the $235,934.10 in net estate proceeds, most of which reflected nonoccupational exposure. The administrative law judge said yes, the Compensation Review Board affirmed, and the Connecticut Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Ecker in which the other justices concurred, affirmed again.
The court's analysis turned on the definition of work-related injury under § 31-275 (16)(A), which includes occupational disease. Under Connecticut precedent, an occupational disease requires only a direct causal connection between employment and the disease — meaning employment must be a substantial contributing factor, not the sole or even the major one. Because Dodge suffered a single disease, mesothelioma, and his workplace exposures were a substantial contributing factor in causing it, the disease was fully compensable as an occupational disease regardless of the concurrent nonoccupational causes. The court held that because the workers' compensation obligation was not reduced to account for nonoccupational exposure, the employers' lien rights — which the court described as generally the same as the employers' payment obligations — likewise extended to the full net settlement proceeds recovered by the estate.
The court also rejected the plaintiff's alternative argument that the product liability tortfeasors were not persons within the meaning of § 31-293 (a) because they had no employment relationship with the decedent. The statute, the court held, uses the term broadly to mean any person other than a compliant employer who has a legal liability to pay damages for the employee's work-related injury. Adding an employment-relationship requirement would supply an exception the legislature did not write. The court distinguished its prior decisions in Dodd v. Middlesex Mutual Assurance Co. and Goodyear v. Discala as involving a breach-of-contract action against an insurer and a legal malpractice claim against former attorneys, respectively — neither of which involved the actual tortfeasors responsible for the underlying work-related injury. Here, the product liability defendants were the actual tortfeasors alleged to have caused Dodge's mesothelioma, placing them squarely within the statute's reach.
The loss-of-consortium proceeds paid to the plaintiff personally were not subject to the lien, a point the court noted was undisputed on appeal.