What Is Strict Liability In A Product Liability Lawsuit?

For most personal injury lawsuits, the plaintiff is required to prove that the party they are suing was negligent for some reason. Negligence means that they failed to exercise the same amount of care that an ordinary person would exercise to ensure the safety of others. If you’re filing a premises liability lawsuit, you must prove that the property owner or agent in control of the property was negligent and caused your injuries. In some cases, however, you don’t need to prove negligence. Negligence is established by the facts of the case.

In terms of product liability, a company is “strictly liable” for injuries caused to a member of the public who was using the company’s product in a manner that could be readily anticipated by the company. For example, you cannot hit yourself over the head with a hammer and say that the company that manufactured the hammer is responsible for your injury. Instead, you would have to prove that the hammer was defective in some way, resulting in your injury. If you can establish the defective nature of the product, you don’t need to do more work as you would in a typical personal injury lawsuit. You can establish that the product itself is defective. That is enough. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the nuances of strict liability as it pertains to product liability lawsuits.

Key aspects of strict liability in product liability lawsuits 

• You do not need to prove negligence – In a product liability lawsuit, the plaintiff does not need to prove negligence to establish that the company is liable. In other words, the plaintiff doesn’t need to prove that the manufacturer or seller acted carelessly when they designed, produced, or marketed the product. They just need to establish the defect.

• The focus is on the product – The central question in a product liability lawsuit is whether or not the product was defective—not whether the manufacturer or seller was at fault for creating the defect.

• Three types of product defects – In a product liability lawsuit, there are three types of allegations you can make against a manufacturer or retailer. These include:

• Design defects – The product’s design is inherently dangerous or defective and causes serious injury to a consumer.
• Manufacturing defect – An error while the product was being produced caused the product to be unsafe.
• Marketing defects – The company failed to warn consumers about a known danger of the product, causing the user to become injured.

Essentially, manufacturers and sellers can be held liable even if they took reasonable care to ensure that the product was safe. The doctrine of strict liability ensures that the legal process for injured consumers is streamlined and simple, allowing them to seek compensation without having to prove negligence.

Talk to a Florida Product Liability Lawyer Today 

The Florida personal injury attorneys at Halpern, Santos & Pinkert represent the interests of injured consumers in product liability cases filed against manufacturers and retailers of dangerous or defective products. Call our office today to schedule an appointment, and we can begin discussing your next steps right away.