Products Liability

Products liability is the liability you or your business may have if your product injures the consumers. Whether you sell the product directly to the consumer or not, you may still be held accountable. It is important to under stand products liability and how it may potentially affect your business

SUMMARY

• Before picking your product to sell, it is important to know about the three types of product liabilities and negligence.
• Manufactures defect is a defect in manufactures and is usually hard to discover until it is too late.
• Design defects has many factors to take into account when deciding how to design your product.
• You should make sure to warn about certain dangers.
• If you know there is an issue, take steps to fix those issues.
• See Product Liability Product Considerations

WHAT IS PRODUCTS LIABILITY?

Products liability is the liability of any parties along the chain of manufacture for the damages caused by the product. There are three main types of products liability: 1) Manufactures defect, 2) Design Defect, and 3) Failure to warn. Negligence is not considered products liability. Negligence is included because you may be liable for negligent acts or omissions taken by you or your business.

MANUFACTURES DEFECT

A manufacturing defect is a defect where the product is manufactured different than the designed product and is more dangerous than the consumer expects it to be. In this case, the defect usually occurs in the manufacturing processes. As the parts are being put together, there may be some point where a part is not placed on correctly or not in the right place leading to someones injury. It may be hard to discover these types of defects, however, you depending on the complexity of your product, you should have some short of quality assurance system built into your processes.

DESIGN DEFECT

A design defect is a defect that is inherent in the design of the product. In this case, the injured would show that the design of the product, whether created by you or the manufacture, was not the safest. If an injury occurs because of a design defect, the injured party may bring up any safer design they can think of and compare it retrospectively to your design. It will be difficult to think up of every possible safe design but, if you are designing your own product, a few things to consider is whether your design has any safer alternative designs, its economic feasibility, and the practicality of the design.

FAILURE TO WARN

Failure to warn is a type of defect on the product that fails to warn of potential dangers that are known or should have been known to the manufacture. If someone was injured through foreseeable uses of the product and the user was not warned of such injury, there may be a failure to warn. These type of warnings are the type of warnings that would appear in manuals and tags placed on electrical cords.

NEGLIGENCE

Negligence is when there is a duty owed, the manufacture or seller breaches their duty, the breach caused an injury and the injured was damaged. Typically in products liability, there is a duty to manufacture safe products. If someone is injured because of an act or omission in manufacturing a safe product, there may be liability if the injury was a foreseeable cause. Usually, this is an alternative factor to take into account. That is whether a manufacture knew or should have known of an issue and did nothing about it.