Practice Areas Personal Injury Product Liability

Boca Raton Lawyers Asserting the Rights of Injured Consumers

People across South Florida use various products in their daily lives with the expectation that the products will perform as anticipated. While most people do not consider that an everyday item could be harmful, many products have dangerous defects that cause serious injuries to the individuals using them. The entities that manufacture and distribute products have a duty to ensure that their products are safe, however, and they can be held accountable to people who suffer harm due to defects in their products. If you sustained injuries while using a defective product, the Boca Raton product liability lawyers at The Grife Law Firm can assess the circumstances surrounding your injuries, advise you on your options, and advocate on your behalf if you have a claim.

Examples of Defective Products

While any product could potentially harbor a defect that causes harm to the person using the product, some products harm consumers more frequently than others. For example, many people suffer injuries due to a chair or another piece of furniture that has a latent defect that causes it to collapse or tip over during ordinary use. Similarly, many people suffer injuries when using ladders that were made with insufficient materials, which can cause the rails to buckle or collapse. Sadly, many of the people injured by defective products are children. For example, children regularly suffer harm because of toys that are unexpectedly dangerous, due to small parts that present choking hazards, toxic materials, and other defects.

Elements of a Product Liability Case in Florida

Typically, a person injured by a defective product will pursue damages in a product liability lawsuit from the companies that designed, manufactured, or distributed the product. There are multiple causes of action that a plaintiff and a product liability attorney in Boca Raton may assert. However, strict liability is probably the most common cause of action. A strict liability claim asserts that the defendant is responsible for the plaintiff’s injuries, regardless of whether the defendant acted negligently. Thus, a defendant can be held liable when a plaintiff is harmed by a defective product, regardless of whether the defendant exercised reasonable care in designing or creating the product.

Under Florida law, a plaintiff alleging that a defendant should be held strictly liable for injuries caused by a dangerous product must show that the product had a defect that made it unreasonably dangerous, and the defect was present when the product left the defendant’s possession. A product may be harmful due to a design defect, a manufacturing defect, or a failure to warn consumers of known risks associated with foreseeable uses of the product. The plaintiff must also prove that the product was not substantially altered from its original condition prior to the harmful event and that the defect was the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injuries.

Generally, our Boca Raton product liability attorneys will need to retain an expert to testify about the way in which a product was defective and the measures that the defendant could have taken to alleviate the defect. For example, under Florida Statutes Section 768.1257, whether a defendant should be held liable for harm caused by a defective design depends on the technical and scientific knowledge available at the time when the product was manufactured, rather than when the injury occurred. Thus, an expert is usually needed to explain the knowledge that existed at the time when the product was developed, and how the defendant’s failure to use that knowledge ultimately caused the plaintiff’s harm.