Product Liability Lawsuits - Legal Concerns And General Information

If a manufacturing defect, a design defect, or a repair defect causes someone to get hurt, then a lawsuit can be filed for product liability. A lawsuit can also occur if someone gets hurt because someone else was doing inherently dangerous things.

Types of Product Liability

In law, there originally wasnt any concept of product liability. It was your business to be sure that you bought safe merchandise. The only way you could get help from a court was if you had a contract and the contract had been broken; you were also limited to just those people who had signed the contract. This changed over time because the courts wanted to be able to do something for people who had been hurt because of something they bought but who didnt have a contract. Now there are four different kinds of product liability.

- Negligence is defined by what a reasonably careful person would or wouldnt do. If someone causes one or more other people to be hurt, either by doing something or not doing something, and the court decides that a reasonably careful person wouldnt have acted or failed to act that way, then that is negligence.

- Breach of warranty means that when a vendor sells you something and makes a promise or claim about its quality or about the type of product you bought, those promises form a warranty.

- Misrepresentation means that a company either deliberately concealed possible harm that could occur if you bought a product or drew attention away from the harm. You have to prove that you relied on the companys misrepresentation.

- Strict liability happens when an action you took causes damage. If you do something dangerous and one or more people get hurt, strict liability says you are responsible even if you were being very careful. In addition, if people get hurt using a defective product, then everyone from the manufacturer to the retail store may be liable for that defect.

Reform

The amount of money awarded by the courts to people for product liability lawsuits has been huge. However, those lawsuits can be ruinous for the businesses that have to pay them. Some businesses have been working the political system in order to change the legal balance between the rights of businesses and customers so that the damages awarded will be limited or reduced.