Dangerous or Defective Design

Atlanta Defective Design Attorney

Products can be considered unreasonably dangerous or defective in 3 major ways:

1. Defective Design - The design can be bad, resulting in needless potential for injury. Oftentimes simple fixes to foreseeable dangers could have avoided many serious injuries and even deaths.

2. Manufacturing Defect – Something could happen during the manufacturing or production of the product to render it less safe than it should be. Examples include: utilizing a bad batch of screws, improperly prepared glues or adhesives to hold something together, bad welds, or a production line failure when something needs to be done a certain way and for some reason is not.

3. Inadequate Warnings and Instructions – Sometimes products which would be safe if properly used can be very dangerous if improperly utilized. The problem is that not all people have the same level of knowledge about how to use even the simplest of products. This is why the law says a product can be defective if the instructions or warnings are inadequate.

Product defect cases can be predicated on theories of negligence (someone did something careless), strict liability (where the law says if a product is unnecessarily dangerous the manufacturer is liable even without proof that something was done wrong) or breach of warranty (where the product does not perform in a manner that is safe for its intended purposes).

As a practical matter, experience shows that many of the above problems are the result of overly ambitious cost-cutting efforts by manufacturers. Their engineers oftentimes know of the problems, but the bean counters insist on cutting costs. The engineer is stuck in the middle. We know how to bring these secrets to light.

Examples of products we have been involved in evaluating include:

Household products like kitchen appliances, hand tools, and electrical devices.

Work Related Products like forklifts, manlifts, compactors, saws, presses, and other work machinery.

Automotive products like cars and trucks in general, for issues related to crashworthiness, defective fuel systems, steering mechanisms, roof structures, tires, brakes, door latches, seatbelts, airbags, rollover propensity, and electrical systems.

Recreational products like trailers, trailer hitches (trailer sway), personal watercraft, boat lifts, deer stands, and many others.

Children’s products like car seats, cribs, walkers, and toys.