West Palm Beach, Fla., is a hotbed of asbestos legislation, and has come alive recently with talk of potential reform of that legislation.

The Palm Beach Post reports that more than 730,000 asbestos claims costing more than $70 billion have already made their way through Palm Beach County, and some lawyers are only encouraging the free-for-all.

They are advertising at as a safe haven for all wayward — and not so wayward — asbestos claims. Which leads many to believe South Florida needs a dose of legislation reform.

Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties are reaching out their arms to welcome millworkers and drywallers in Alabama, Mississippi and other Southern states with industrial backgrounds, says The Post.

There, a “plaintiff can hop on what lawyers call the asbestos ‘rocket docket’ and stand a better chance of getting a settlement without going through trial,” the article says. Each of the three counties has a separate asbestos division and a set of rules, called an omnibus order, for processing the claims.

Plaintiff lawyers like the system because it lets them schedule hundreds of cases for trial at once, which pressures defendant companies to offer settlements to avoid the costs of a trial. And naturally, defense lawyers dislike it for the same reason.

Lawyers argue that if asbestos cases were on every judge’s docket, they would be in court "four days a week, crowding out everybody else,” says a defense litigator. But some attorneys say the system worked fairly well when claims were fewer and represented people who clearly had asbestos-related cancers and lung damage.

Some say the system has broken down in recent years under thousands of lawsuits by people who have no symptoms and are simply staking out a claim in case they do get sick, or before more defendant companies run out of money, the article says.

Some suggestions offered to better the legislation system include placing the claims of those without symptoms on an inactive docket until they qualify as an active case and dismissing or transferring cases that have no connection to Palm Beach County.