Injuries From Defective & Dangerous Products
If a product injures you and there is a good argument that the product is unreasonably dangerous it can be an excellent case against both the manufacturer and the companies and people in the retail distribution chain.
Unlike ordinary negligence cases in product liability cases there is no reduction for the plaintiff being partially at fault.
Helpful Information For Product Liability Cases:
Forseeable Misuse
Some lawsuits have encouraged lawyers for manufacturers to generate a blizzard of warnings, many of them so obvious that some consumers just ignore the whole mass of warnings. More importantly, in some cases manufacturers try to cover their butts with warnings that we don't believe will hold up in court.
Example For Illustrative Purposes Only:
Lehigh's "Quick Link" sold at Home Depot is a link of chain with an opening on one side that opens and closes with a screw mechanism. It is a way to connect things to a chain or make a loop out of a chain. The stainless steel size we bought said, "800 lbs safe working load" on the front of the package. On the back of the package is a warning that reads in part, "Do not use this product...or other situation where personal safety or valuable property could be endangered." We think that whenever there are hundreds of pounds of tension on a chain, its sudden rupture can cause human injury so it is foreseeable that this Quick Link will be used in situations in which if it fails, injury will occur. If we had such a case we would argue that the "800 lbs safe working load" statement encouraged use in which a failure at a lesser load could cause human injury.
Although a consumer may have misused or was careless with a product or piece of equipment this may not save the manufacturer from being liable if the product or piece of equipment was badly designed or had a design flaw.
Case Example:
In the 1970's Ford made some vehicles with an automatic transmission that could pop from Park into Reverse all by itself if the car was jolted, as for example, by a door slamming. We once represented a lady who had such a car. One day she went grocery shopping. When she got home she put the car into Park, left the engine running, and didn't apply the parking brake. She then walked to the back, opened the tailgate of her wagon, picked up her bag of groceries, slammed the tailgate down and the wagon popped into reverse and ran over her leg. After we did a videotaped re-enactment of this accident (showing the car jump from Park to Reverse) and hired a transmission expert Ford paid up. Notice that in this case:
- The Plaintiff was careless because she left the vehicle running without putting on the parking brake, but that didn't hurt us because in product liability cases, unlike most personal injury cases, this is not a complete or even partial defense, and
- Her car was quite old but that also didn't hurt the case because the design was dangerous. A curious note to this case is that Ford paid a lot of money to settle the case and the lady still had the old Ford that injured her. At the time of settlement the vehicle probably had a value of $200. I asked Ford if they wanted the car to scrap it as part of the settlement and they said, "No." For all I know this car is still on the road.
Sometimes whether a product that has hurt someone is defective is a question that can be easily answered by looking at competing products. Glock and some other high end pistols chosen by top law enforcement agencies are very unlikely to fire if they are accidentally dropped while a bullet is in the chamber. The fact that these gun manufacturers have engineered around a potentially fatal problem suggests that pistols that do fire when accidentally dropped are unreasonably dangerous. In some potential products liability cases, a comparison of the alleged defective product with its competitors can be much easier.
Case Example:
At Reed Mansfield, we had a case involving a step ladder with one step that collapsed with the result that the plaintiff suffered a serious femur (thigh bone) fracture. A side view of the step ladder was like the letter "A" with the horizontal bar in the "A" being the single step. This step fell down with the Plaintiff standing on it because the two sides of the letter "A" came apart at ground level. After spending a few hours looking at competing single step step ladders at places like Office Max and WalMart I became convinced that the mechanism on this ladder preventing the legs from spreading too far apart was incredibly weak and prone to failure. We were even able to settle this case fairly without hiring an expert to point this out.
In addition to products that are manufactured with a defect, many people are hurt by products which are not well maintained. For example, the closure device on a automatic door might leave the factory in good condition but because of a lack of maintenance it might malfunction and cause a door to slam on a person and knock them to the ground or close hard enough to break a bone. We also handle these cases. There are a number of interesting car cases where this defense has been raised, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. If a brake line ruptures and the car can't stop and death or injury results it would be a very good case if the car was 10 years old. If the car was 60 years old it might not be a good case.
Reed Mansfield Succesful Cases
A big manufacturing company sold a trailer mounted air compressor to a Las Vegas construction company. Safety chains to hold the trailer to the tow vehicle in case the trailer hitch came undone were an extra-cost option which the construction company decided not to pay for. The construction company's driver connected the trailer to his assigned pick-up trick and used the wrong size "ball" hitch. The trailer became disconnected and the tongue of the trailer went through my client's windshield, left eye, and part of her brain. She survived in a severely disabled condition.
It was a multi-million dollar negligence claim against the construction company and a multi-million dollar products liability claim against the manufacturing company for selling an unsafe product.
A lady bought "Head to Toe Tingling Tonic." The label said, "to feel good splash all over body, especially after taking a bath." My client got out of the bath tub, splashed some tonic on her arms and some vapors or drops from the tonic got ignited by the space heater in her bathroom--it was a mountain cabin--and the tonic burned her arms. There was nothing on the label to warn that the product was flammable and shouldn't be used near an ignition source.
In this case, the mere fact that the product was flammable might not have made it unreasonably dangerous. Rubbing alcohol is also flammable, but there is a long history of using rubbing alcohol to bring down fevers, and, perhaps, for sterilization. The flammable alcohol content of rubbing alcohol is intrinsic to its use and not unreasonably dangerous as long as there is an adequate warning that the product is flammable. But in the case of the head to toe tingling tonic the product was defective both because it lacked a warning label--indeed the label encouraged a dangerous use--and because the idea of spashing something flammable on your body to feel good is really dumb. In other words the dangerousness of the product was not offset by some important usefulness. This was clearly a defective product.
A dishwasher at the Sahara Hotel and Casino, while dispensing powdered detergent from a dispenser, got some in his eye. The detergent was so caustic that it literally dissolved part of the surface of his eye before he could wash it out. In this case it was argued that either the soap was too strong or that it failed to carry an adequate warning of how strong it was and that the maker of the soap dispenser had designed a defective dispenser.
The trial court judge disagreed and granted summary judgment to the defendants but, Attorney Johnathan Reed appealed and won in the Nevada Supreme Court. Fyssakis v. Knight Equipment, 108 Nev. 212, 826 P.2d 570.
