If you suffer an injury or other damage after using a specific product, you may wonder whether you have a product liability case.
How do you know if the manufacturer really is responsible for your injury? First you need to understand the different kinds of liability cases.
Liability can fall under one of three different categories.
• Defective marketing • Defective manufacturing • Defective design Defective marketing involves the process in which a product is sold.
For example, if medication is marketed without informing the customer about dangerous side effects, that would fall under defective marketing practices.
Defective manufacturing and defective design involve the actual product.
Let's examine the differences between the two.
Detective Manufacturing Most people think of defective manufacturing when they hear about accidents.
This is when the defect occurs while the product is being made- when something happens during manufacturing process that makes that product different from all of the others.
There may be more than one product affected, but all of the defective products would be caused by a problem in the manufacturing process.
An example of a manufacturing defect could be an electric blanket that erupts in flames or automobile brakes that don't function properly causing an accident.
A simple way to look at it is that defective manufacturing is an unplanned defect.
Defective Design Defective design is when the defect is part of the design process- all of the product line is defective because the problem lies in the way it was designed.
It would be clear from the blueprints that the problem existed before it was ever made.
An example of a defective design would be a line of cribs with the slats far enough apart that a baby could fit its head through.
The crib was built the way it was supposed to be, but the plans were faulty.
Determining Product Liability with a Defective Product When there is a liability case, it needs to be determined whether the product has a manufacturing defect or a defective design.
The first question usually asked is: How many products in the line are defective? Is it just a few parts of the line, in which case it would be a manufacturer's defect? Or is the entire product line affected, in which case it would be a cause of defective design? If the issue is a manufacturer's defect, and was not a planned instance, then the manufacturer is still liable.
It doesn't even matter if they did everything they could to keep it from happening.
That is called the statute of strict liability.
The plaintiff is only responsible for proving that the defect was not a matter of wear and tear, and in fact was there when it left the factory.
In a defective design case, the claimant intends to show that the manufacturer should have chosen a safer design and is therefore responsible.
A test is done to answer two questions- was the design dangerous, and should that have been clear to the manufacturer?