Products Liability

A product can be considered defective in three ways:

• Marketing Defects: When a product has a marketing defect, it means that it was labeled in a way that made it unsafe to use or that the directions were wrong or unclear. With a marketing defect, the product could have been safe if it was used properly, but the way it was marketed or packaged led people to use it in a different way and get hurt.
• Manufacturing Defects: When a product has a manufacturing defect, it is made in a way that makes it weak, broken, or unreliable. The product might have been safe if it had been made correctly, but the way it was made—usually by taking shortcuts to save money—meant that it would break or fail easily and hurt people.
• Design Defects: Design defects mean that the product is unsafe because of how it was made. In other words, the product was likely to hurt people even if it was made and sold correctly and if people followed the directions and used it correctly.

Under most circumstances, a product must cause damage to be considered defective. A product that merely breaks easily or performs poorly is unlikely to give rise to a legitimate legal claim. A product liability case, however, would be feasible if the method it failed or broke was also hazardous.

The “damage” doesn’t need to result in an injury. For example, consider a warehouse owner who invested in commercial refrigeration systems to enable meat storage in the facility. If the systems were flawed, the meat might have spoiled, costing the company potentially tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. That is a real type of harm, and the warehouse owner can file a lawsuit for it (even though no one was hurt).