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Product Liability Cases

When consumers purchase a product, they expect it to be safe and efficient in its performance. But this doesn’t stand true in a few cases. Defective products and misleading advertisements can lead to dire consequences. Our present consumer-driven economy thereby came up with a thorough law regarding product liability at the end of 20th century.

The product liability law caters to three kinds of lawsuits: strict liability, breach of warranty, and negligence. Although the forms of these lawsuits vary a little from one state to another, there are a few common elements in these state laws that include:

Defect – You must prove the defect in the product

Causation – You have to prove that you were hurt because of that defect in the product

Injury – You have to show that you were actually injured because of the defect in the product

Duty – You have to show that the manufacturer or the seller owed the responsibility to sell or make a product that is safe to use. Duty is normally assumed in product liability cases.

Negligence Cases

Like the usual negligence lawsuits, apart from the above mentioned common elements of defect, duty, injury, and causation, you will have to provide evidence for the fact that the seller or the manufacturer has violated their duty towards you. This is usually done by proving that the manufacturer or the seller already knew or might have known about the defect in the product on the basis of the information made available about it. 

Strict Liability

These cases are associated with the manufacturer of an extremely dangerous product. You do not have to prove the negligence of the maker, or the designing or manufacturing defect of the product in these cases.

Breach of Warranty

This lawsuit caters to the failure of the product to fulfil its warranted characteristics that may have caused you injury. Warranties may be implied by law, written, or sometimes even verbal.

What Qualifies to be a Defect?

There are times when you may get injured by a product but if the injury is not because of any defect in the product, you cannot ask for a compensation for your injuries. For instance, a perfect quality bat may also sometimes break when you are using it but if you happen to get hurt in the process because the bat gets broken from its handle, it won’t quality for a defect.

There are three types of product defects:

Manufacturing Defects – Let us take bats as an example again. Supposedly, the bat maker has no method of inspecting the wood quality that is used in manufacturing these bats. As a result, some bats that are made have voids or knots. Unfortunately, you buy one of these bats and it breaks and end up hurting you. This will be called a manufacturing defect.

Design Defect - Sticking with bats, say the maker decides to build a new type of bat with an aluminum head attached to a composite handle. It seems superior, but after a certain amount of use and contact, the head tends to detach from the handle. You're hit by a detached bat head. That's a design defect. In some cases where the product is of great utility you may have to prove the product is on whole more dangerous than useful.

Failure to Warn - Let's move from bats to wood mauls. You use a maul to split firewood. The maul is wedge-shaped and the blunt end looks like a good substitute for a sledge hammer. You strike a spike with this end, the wedge splinters and a piece flies into your eye. Your case could turn on whether there was a proper warning label on the maul. If there's not a warning about product use, the maker may face for failing to warn about safe use.

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