Friday, February 17, 2012

Defective products

I noticed that there is a tendency among the general public to be very skeptical of defective product suits. That is because often they too often jump to the conclusion that the product was not defective but that the person could not use it properly. Although sometimes an injury caused by a product is the result of grossly misusing that product, oftentimes it is the result of a faulty design. A good example of this is ATV's. People think these vehicles are inherently dangerous, and of course they are. However, that doesn't mean someone should automatically jump to the conclusion that the driver is at fault if he or she wipes out on the ATV and suffers an injury. That is because the accident could have been a result of the ATV being an inferior product. For example, the particular ATV being driven could have been designed so that when someone takes a turn at 20 miles it flips over. However, every other ATV on the market could be designed to take a turn at 20 miles an hour. In that situation, because the company made a product that was less safe than others on the market they knew or should have known that people would become injured as a result of this design. Therefore, it seems only fair that someone injured by this product should receive compensation. When it comes to faulty designs the law takes into account if there could have been a safer design that is also cost effective. So basically a company will only be held liable for a design when there is a better safer design they could have chosen that also would not have been too costly to implement. I don't believe that this is such a high standard or an unreasonable one, and a lot of people don't understand this, and continue to be highly skeptical of fault product law suits. Therefore, I think it is important to educate the general public about these lawsuits.

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