Corporate greed may have turned out a bad product, but you do not have to be a victim of product liability.
Most of us trust products manufactured because we have been trained to know that the government will step in and correct underlying issues with a product, but that is not always the case.
In Arizona, claims most commonly associated with product liability are specific to negligence, strict liability, breach of warranty, and various consumer protection claims. We fight for our clients on product liability cases.
There are three major types of product liability lawsuits or claims:
- Manufacturing defect
- Design defect
- Failure to warn
These defects can be found in an extensive list of products, such as:
- Harmful drugs
- Defective products
- Vehicles prone to rollover & roof crush
- Seat belts that fail
- Car doors that swing open & eject the occupants
- Faulty pacemakers
- Tires that blow
- Bead separation cases
- Airbags that fail to deploy
- Design defects
- Manufactures defects
- Malfunctioning devices
These deadly products should be eradicated from our market system so that innocent citizens no longer get injured or even killed by these unsafe hazards.
Lets a take a further look into the specifics of the product liability definition:
Defects: Manufacturing defects occur in manufacturing and usually involve poor-quality materials or shoddy workmanship. Design defects occur where the product design is inherently dangerous or useless (hence defective), no matter how carefully manufactured. Failure-to-warn defects arise in products that carry inherent non-obvious dangers that could be mitigated through adequate warnings to the user. These dangers are present regardless of how well the product is manufactured and designed for its intended purpose.
Warranties: Warranties are statements by a manufacturer or seller concerning a product during a commercial transaction. Breach of warranty-based product liability claims usually focuses on one of three types: (1) breach of an express warranty, (2) breach of an implied warranty of merchantability, and (3) breach of an implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose.
Negligence: A basic negligence claim consists of a duty owed, a breach of that duty, an injury, and the breach proximately caused the plaintiff’s injury.
Strict Liability: Rather than focus on the manufacturer’s behavior (as in negligence), strict liability claims focus on the product itself. Under strict liability, the manufacturer is liable if the product is defective, even if the manufacturer was not negligent in making that product defective. The difficulty with negligence is that it still requires the plaintiff to prove that the defendant’s conduct fell below the relevant standard of care. However, suppose an entire industry tacitly settles on a somewhat careless standard of conduct. In that case, the plaintiff may not be able to recover even though he or she is severely injured because although the defendant’s conduct caused his or her injuries, such conduct was not negligent in the legal sense. As a practical matter, with the increasing complexity of products, injuries, and medical care (which made many formerly fatal injuries survivable), it is quite a complex and expensive task to find and retain good expert witnesses who can establish the standard of care, breach, and causation.