Abilify Personal Injury Attorney
When you’re injured because of a defective product, you might be wondering who is responsible. Lawyers want to help you understand your options in a product defect case.
What Is Product Liability?
Product liability occurs when a manufacturer or seller is responsible or liable for putting a defective product into the hands of a consumer. A consumer buying a product has reason to believe that the product will meet their ordinary expectations for its use. If the product fails to meet that ordinary expectation or ends up injuring the consumer, then there is product liability and you can begin to get to the bottom of who is to blame. These cases are usually subjective and function on a case-to-case basis.
What Types of Product Defect Are There?
Manufacturing Defects happen while the product is being manufactured or assembled. Marketing Defects occur if a product is marked incorrectly, if it does not include safety warnings and if there are not sufficient instructions for its use. In other words, the marketing of the product is defective. Design Defects are issues with the design that stem from a product’s inception, before it even gets created or manufactured, that make the product inherently unsafe.
Who Is Responsible?
For product liability to apply, at some point the defective product must have been sold in the marketplace. This doesn’t mean that if you use a product that you borrowed from a friend or that you were gifted, you’re out of luck if your product was defective. In fact, most state laws state that the injured person does not have to be the purchaser of the product in order to recover damages. you Every product has a chain of distribution starting from the manufacturer and ending with the consumer. Anyone in that chain can be responsible.
- The product manufacturer
- The manufacturer of the parts that were used for the product
- The party that assembled the product
- The wholesaler that sold the product to retail stores
- The retail store that sold the product to the consumer
There are two ways for a plaintiff to shift the burden of proof to the defendants. One example is the rule of strict liability. If strict liability applies, the plaintiff no longer has to prove that the manufacturer was negligent, but that the product was defective. Another example is called “res ipsa loquitur” which means “the thing speaks for itself” This is the idea that the defect would not exist unless someone was negligent in the process of making the product.
Let a Product Defect Lawyer Help You With Your Case
Contact a personal lawyer Charlottesville, VA offers to handle your case it you recently found yourself suffering from an injury as the result of a defective product. A product defect lawyer can help you make a case.
Thank you to our friends and contributors at MartinWren, P.C. for their insight into product liability and who is responsible for a defective product.
