New York City Personal Injury Product Liability Lawyers Attorneys

If you or someone you know has been affected from a defective product, the Law Offices of Leo V. Duval, Esq. can help. Product liability is the name currently given to the area of law involving the liability of designers, manufacturers, and suppliers of products for injuries to purchasers, users, and bystanders caused by defects in the products they market.

The purpose of products liability is to insure that the costs of injuries resulting from defective products are borne by those who put the defective products on the market rather than by the injured persons who are powerless to protect themselves.

Theories of liability on which a products liability action may be based include strict liability, negligence, and breach of warranty.

Many products are manufactured today that can become dangerous when not properly designed, manufactured, or contain improper warnings of the dangerous propensities of the product.

When a manufacturer of a product is faced with mounting production costs for their product, safety and quality can be compromised. In some cases, manufacturers will release products into the stream of commerce that are unreasonably unsafe for the public, either knowingly or unknowingly.

The three primary ways a product can be defective is:

(1) design - a defect that arises from some aspect of the design or plan of the product that makes the product unsafe.

(2) manufacture - results from a flaw in the manufacturing process that causes a product to differ from the manufacturer’s intended result or from other ostensibly identical units of the same product line. That is, when a product comes off the assembly line in a substandard condition it has incurred a manufacturing defect.

(3) failure to warn of dangerous propensities of the product - one may recover under strict liability where an injury is caused by the manufacturer’s failure to provide the consumer with conspicuous and appropriate warnings of the known or knowable dangers resulting from foreseeable use of the product.

Additionally, in cases of particularly egregious conduct by the manufacturer, they may be liable for punitive damages.