When Corporations Let Us Down
We rely on products to run every aspect of our lives, whether it’s driving to the store, painting a wall, or trying to protect ourselves from traumatically loud noises. When everything works right, our lives continue seamlessly. When it doesn’t, the consequences can vary from an inconvenience to serious physical harm.
Product liability is the area of the law that handles the situations in which products fail. When a consumer is injured at no fault of their own, the responsibility falls on the company that designed, manufactured, and sold the product. While every product has risks, it is up to the companies that built them to reduce those risks and make consumers aware of them.
Where There is Liability
When things go wrong, it can be easy to wonder what happened. In a legal sense, there are three areas where companies can be held accountable: in design, in manufacturing, and in marketing.
Products that are defective in the design stage are products in which the manufacturers knew of a problem in the design but made the product anyway. This could be an avoidable defect, such as neglecting to add proper safety features.
Manufacturing liabilities occur when there are errors in the manufacturing process. These errors can be the use of substandard materials or improper processing. Manufacturing liabilities sometimes involve a calculation between the cost to recall and/or remake the product and the cost to settle cases with injured consumers; in these instances, corporations are deciding the economic value of their consumers’ lives and livelihoods.
When a product is under fire for a marketing defect, it means that the corporation failed to properly warn its consumers of the dangers related to the product. If you’ve ever wondered why ads for pharmaceuticals often end with a voice quickly listing side effects, often including conditions more serious than what the drug is supposed to handle, marketing defect cases are the reason.
Product Liability Mass Torts
When a defective product has widespread impacts, it might require a mass tort case to hold the corporation fully accountable. A tort is a legal term meaning “wrongful act.” Where an individual product liability case is a tort, a group of cases with similar instances of wrongdoing can constitute a mass tort. Mass torts are a way for courts to organize similar cases against the same manufacturer, but each case is independent of the others. This is different from class action suits, where all the victims file a single suit.
The Cases Skinner Law Firm is Currently Involved In
We at Skinner Law Firm pride ourselves on our dedication to helping consumers who have been injured by a wide array of products. These products include hernia mesh, transvaginal mesh, 3M combat earplugs, defective metal-on-metal hips, Valsartan, and opioids. If you think you have a product liability case, contact us for a free review. We are experienced at examining cases and are constantly updating our knowledge of medical devices and drug cases.
