Products Liability Litigation
Many lawsuits allege that a defendant sold a product that was either defective or that did not work as advertised. These lawsuits expose defendants to a lot of liability, and so many companies get insurance to pay for the inevitable litigation that ensues from making and selling a product. Litigating these cases requires both a knowledge of the applicable law, but also the curiosity to learn about the technical details in everyday objects and in completely foreign ones. I’ve worked on several and I’ve learned a lot.
Why should you read this post about products liability litigation?
You stuck your tongue in a toaster and now you want money.
You want to know how people can assert very different legal theories arising from the same defective product.
You think this blog is defective and you want money for it.
Image credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaster#/media/File:Consumer_Reports_-_Hamilton_Beach_Digital_toaster.tiff
Design and Manufacturing Defect Claims
A major type of products liability lawsuit claims that the manufacturer was negligent. These claims vary in different jurisdictions, but there generally are two types of these claims: design defect claims allege that the manufacturer negligently designed the product, so that all of the products it made are equally defective. This could also include a “failure to warn,” meaning the product was defective because it did not include some instruction on how dangerous the product could be. And manufacturing defect claims allege that the product was designed well, but that in actually building the product, the manufacturer made a mistake and the specific unit the plaintiff encountered was defective.
Proving these claims can be difficult: a plaintiff may need to allege what the standard of care that a manufacturer owed to the plaintiff and then establish that the defendant violated that standard. That usually requires retaining an expert who can share details about the industry. I find some of these details interesting! There are whole worlds dedicated to making and designing mundane products. But finding a good expert and then working with the expert to produce a coherent report and to testify well is hard work and doesn’t just magically happen because the expert is well-credentialed.
Plaintiffs often assert these claims against the actual designer and manufacturer of a product. It used to be that these claims could not succeed because there was no “privity” (or direct relationship) between the manufacturer and the plaintiff if the plaintiff did not actually buy the product directly from the manufacturer (and instead bought it from a third party store or encountered it without a sale). But by the 1960s, this requirement had fallen away in many jurisdictions.
Still, many states limit these claims pursuant to the Economic Loss Doctrine to ones where a plaintiff incurred physical injury or sustained losses besides the failure of the product in question.
Breach of Warranty Claims
Another type of products liability claim functions more like a contract claim. Instead of arguing that a manufacturer was negligent in making or designing a product, state laws may allow a plaintiff to sue a defendant because they violated a warranty for how the product would operate. Since this is distinct from negligence, this liability could apply, even if the defect was not foreseeable and the defendant was not negligent.
Typically, state law (often imposed by the Uniform Commercial Code) allows for two types of warranty claims: the warranty of merchantability and the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. The first warranty is a promise that the product will work in a way that people may typically expect the product to work. And the second is a promise that the product will work in the way that the seller said it would for the buyer’s specific intended use.
Plaintiffs often bring these cases against the seller of the product, not necessarily the maker or designer of the product. In that case, a store could incur liability for defects in the products it sold, even if the defect was someone else’s fault.
Many sellers “disclaim” these “implied” warranties. They may put in a sales agreement (often in all caps so that a lawyer may argue that the disclosure was made deliberately) that the seller is not making any claims about how the product would work so the buyer cannot later sue and claim the product failed to live up to this representations. Sellers may instead offer their own “limited warranties” that expressly say what a buyer can expect from a product and limit their ability to sue for anything else.
Just like negligence claims, these claims often also require expert testimony to establish whether the warranties really were broken.
Strict Liability Claims
In some situations, the law will impose “strict liability” on a defendant. This means that, if a plaintiff is injured, it does not matter whose fault it is. This is meant to give manufacturers an incentive to make their products so safe that the risk of any injury, even one they could claim is not their fault, is low.
Businesses tend not to like strict liability since it makes them pay for problems they claim are not their fault. Courts recognize that there need to be limits to this doctrine, and so apply limits like the Economic Loss Doctrine.