If you spend good money on a product – whether a household item, appliance, food, or something else – you expect it to be of the best quality, and more importantly, be safe to use or consume.
If you are injured due to a defective product, you may want to consider filing a personal injury claim against the manufacturer, seller, or both.
Compensation from a personal injury claim can help you make up the costs of medical bills, lost wages, and general pain and suffering. First, browse what types of defective product claims may apply to you.
Types of Defective Product Claims
There are three main categories when it comes to filing a defective product personal injury claim:
- Defectively manufactured products
- Defectively designed products
- Failure to provide instructions or warnings
For a product with a manufacturing defect, perhaps the most common type of product liability claim, an error occurred while making the product that causes it to be unsafe for use. For instance, a defectively manufactured product could be a vehicle made with misshapen brake pads that cause accidents, or a batch of pain relieving medication with an incorrect chemical added to it that makes it poisonous to consume.
Defectively designed products can be seen when an entire product is issued a “product recall." In these cases, there is an inherent flaw in the design of the product that makes it defective and unsafe. For example, a children’s car seat may be defectively designed, causing it to be ineffective in keeping children safe in a car accident.
For the third type of product liability, a product manufacture fails to provide adequate warning about their product that the consumer needs to know in order to safely use it. Examples would include a kitchen appliance that doesn’t come with instructions about safe and proper handling or a cold medicine that doesn’t warn the consumer about the expected side effects, both leading to injuries.
According to My Fox Boston, across the state of Massachusetts in 2015, women filed class action lawsuits against the manufacturer of a popular drug that helps with the side effects of morning sickness because it caused birth defects in their children. Although the current lawsuit outcome is still in progress, in 2012, a large pharmaceutical company paid a three billion dollar settlement in for a long list of defective drugs, and one of them was the involved morning sickness medication.
Liability for Defective Food Products
In the case of food products, whether or not it is defective comes down to if there are foreign or natural materials found in the food. For example, a packaged food manufacturer might accidentally produce a boxed dinner that includes metal shavings from the production line, which can cause internal bleeding upon consumption. This is considered a foreign object in the food and causes the manufacturer to be liable for a defective product.
On the other hand, a restaurant could serve a packaged dish that accidentally has a chicken bone inside the food, causing a person to choke. The manufacturer wouldn’t be held liable for the occurrence of a natural food product in this package, but the restaurant may be held liable for this incident in other ways.
Personal Injury Attorney
If you are considering filing a personal injury claim against a product manufacturer, you may want to consider hiring a personal injury attorney. An attorney can help you throughout the claims process to maximize your chances of receiving compensation.
