West Texas Defective Product Liability Attorney

In a successful product liability lawsuit, your attorney may recover an award, called “damages,” for the injuries and losses you have suffered. This includes an amount to compensate for your economic and non-economic losses, and, in some circumstances, there may be punitive damages as well.

Economic, or Special Damages

This is an award to cover your monetary, calculable out-of-pocket expenses or financial losses for expenses that include:

• Medical, pharmaceutical, hospital, and rehabilitation bills
• Lost wages, current and future
• Cost to repair or replace damaged property.

Non-economic or General Damages

These are payments that go directly to you as compensation for the pain and suffering and negative effects on your lifestyle caused by the defective product. Non-economic damages are less easily calculated, but they typically include compensation for:

• Pain and suffering
• Mental and emotional anguish
• Loss of consortium and negative effects on your marital relationship
• Loss of life’s enjoyment.

For example, if a back injury from an automobile accident caused by a defective product left you paralyzed, economic damages would cover the cost of medical bills and therapy; non-economic damages would compensate you for the past, present, and future pain and suffering resulting from your injury.

Punitive or Exemplary Damages

These are damages awarded on rare occasions as a penalty to punish a defendant for gross negligence and reckless actions and to discourage this type of offense from happening again. Punitive damages are capped at the larger of:

• $200,000 or
• two times the amount of economic damages plus an equal amount of non-economic damages, with a maximum of $750,000.

In a product injury lawsuit, your product injury lawyer must show that one of the following three types of defects caused you harm:

1. Design defects

Design defects occur when something in the design of the product has an unnecessary risk of causing injury or death to someone using it. Not every product that can cause harm is defective. Some products, such as a chain saw, for example, can obviously be dangerous if not used correctly, but this is due to their nature and not some design defect.

To prove that the design is defective, your attorney must show that . . .

• The manufacturer could have used a less dangerous design.
• The alternate design would have been reasonable financially and technologically.
• The alternate design would have reduced the risk of injury but still kept most of the product’s usefulness.
• You were injured from the design defect.

Examples of design defects include:

• Airbags that shoot metal fragments into the body when they inflate
• Medical mesh that causes deadly infections when implanted in the body
• Child safety seats that do not fasten correctly and can become dislodged.

2. Marketing defects

Marketing defects occur when the manufacturer does not provide proper warnings or instructions about how to use the product to reduce risks. Manufacturers are required to provide warning labels or statements if the product has an unexpected danger that is not obvious or if it must be used a certain way to be safe.

To prove marketing defects, your attorney would show that:

• The manufacturer failed to warn you of risks of the product that would not be obvious to a reasonable person.
• The manufacturer failed to provide instructions for safe use.
• You were injured due to this failure of labeling or instructions.

If the labeling or design of a product complies with federal regulations, your attorney would have to show that the regulations were inadequate or that the manufacturer withheld product information that may have affected its approval.

Some products, such as prescription drugs, for example, have risks and side effects by their nature, but they are still prescribed because the physician determines that the benefits outweigh the risks. However, if the drug manufacturer failed to warn about risks, failed to provide information about risks to the FDA, or a safer alternative could be used, it is possible that the medication could be found to be dangerous in a product liability case.

These are errors that occur during the production process of the product, even if the design and labeling were correct. Manufacturing defects usually are caused by errors in quality control or production and may not occur in every identical item produced. This category includes defects that occur because a seller modifies a product substantially in a way that makes it unsafe.

Your West Texas product liability attorney at Hanna Law will work to show that your injuries were caused by a product that had one of these three defects.

Call 432-606-2378 today so we can start gathering information to prove your case.