Many products on the market, from defective automobile parts to household items, can cause serious injury. After a serious injury, a product recall is usually too little, too late. If you or a loved one has been injured or killed, you should consider a lawsuit to recover your damages. Note that a products liability lawsuit can involve complex issues involving design, manufacturing and labeling defects and multiple parties.
Products defects need to have been present when you or someone else purchased the item, and must have been the actual cause of the injury or fatality. Experienced Chattanooga products liability attorneys can help make sense of all the legal intricacies and identify defects including:
- Design defects: A design defect claim should stem from the inherent danger of the product, even if tailor-made to the manufacturer's requirements. One example would be a car model that tends to overturn when making a left turn. If you bought a car with that defect, drove it and crashed while making a left turn, you may have a defective design claim.
- Manufacturer defect: A manufacturer defect claim should argue that the product is flawed due to some mistake when it was made. There may have been a problem at the factory where it was made, making it dissimilar from others on the market, e.g. a batch of medication containing a toxic element, or a motorcycle missing a disk brake.
- Defects in labeling: A claim for a defect in labeling involves arguing that the manufacturer failed to give suitable instructions or warnings about a product’s proper use—for example, that the product may pose non-obvious dangers to the user, or that it requires distinct safeguards when used (such as a label on cold medicine that does not contain a warning about dangerous side effects if mixed with other drugs).
How the types of defects relate
There may be some overlap among the three types of defects. Consider a defective liquid cold medicine. If, after taking the medicine, you suffered a stroke, this would be a design defect. If you were hurt because this product accidentally contained a toxic substance from the factory, this would be a manufacturing defect. If the cold medicine was made and designed safely, but the warning label made no mention of it being unsafe to combine with — and you got sick — this would be a labeling defect.
Potential defendants
Your case may involve one or more types of defect. It is important to consider every party that is involved in the chain of distribution. This is the path the product journeyed, from manufacturer to distributer to seller to you and the injury victim, and may involve a number of different persons and companies, including:
- Manufacturers
- Design consultants
- Labeling specialists
- Resellers of used goods
- Retailers
- Wholesalers
- Distributers
A products liability injury action must be commenced a year after the accident happens. Contact the highly competent Chattanooga, TN, product liability attorneys at Berke, Berke & Berke as soon as possible to help you quickly and thoroughly determine what kind of products liability case you may have against all available sources of compensation.
Contact a Chattanooga products liability law firm with decades of experience
Berke, Berke & Berke is a premier products liability law firm in Chattanooga. Our generations of client commitment and dedication, as well as our ample resources, enable us to fight large insurance companies and corporations — achieving satisfactory results for our loyal clients. If you or a loved one suffered an injury from a defective product, call our office today for a free consultation.