Question

In product liability cases the plaintiff must establish that the product was defective. What are the 4 types of defects that can result in a company being held responsible for injuries under the legal theory of product liability?

Answer 1

To elaborate on the first statement, in a product liability case the plaintiff must establish that a product caused a physical injury and that injury is because of a product's defect, and not a result of misuse/ wrong usage by the user.

Now that the we have established the proof requirements on the plaintiff's part in a product liability case, the case can be based on defects that could be broadly classified into three types,not four. The defect types are as follows,

1) Design defects: These are the inherent defects present in the contextual definition of the product, which would have existed even before the manufacturing started. These defects could be a poorly defined use case, or weak functional design or even the product's inherent cons outweighing their intended purpose and many such.

2) Manufacturing defect: These are defects that emanated in the shop floor/ assembly line. These defects won't be prevalent across all produced product, but rather just the affected batch.

3) Marketing defect: These are not very significant or irreversible defects. These are just caused because of lack of communication/ miscommunication on the acceptable and safe usage of the product from the producer to it's intended user.