Product liability is a legal principle that is intended to safeguard consumers from dangers that they may face due to the negligence of manufactures in the production process. This legal liability enables anyone that is injured or adversely affected by a defective product to take action against the party accountable for their suffering. It also allows them to secure financial compensation for their losses ( Boop 2019). There are three basic categories of product liability based on product defects, which include manufacturing defect, design defect, and marketing defect. Firstly, the manufacturing defect transpires when a product is designed well but an error occurred during the making of the product, which may affect some of the versions of that product (DuBois Law Group LLC, 2019). An example of a famous manufacturing defect case was the General Motors lawsuit over engine coolant problems (Schiffman Law Office, 2019) . As a result, they agreed to pay up to $ 150 million to those that claimed engine damage from faulty coolants.
Secondly, design defect is another form of product liability, and it is where the whole product is poorly designed, and tested, therefore, making all products to be dangerous and unsafe for consumers ( DuBois Law Group LLC, 2019) . An example of a renowned case of design defect was the 2017, Remington Model 700 trigger lawsuit whereby 7.5 million guns were defective. (Schiffman Law Office, 2019) . However, Remington still denies and maintains that the guns are safe, but after the settlement, most of the guns were retrofitted with the new trigger mechanism and owners of the guns were offered a product voucher worth $10 and above.
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The last form of product liability is marketing defect where, in this case, the manufacturer of the product fails to provide adequate instructions, safety warnings and appropriate labeling that may aid consumers evade getting injured by the product ( DuBois Law Group LLC, 2019) . An example of a marketing defect case is McDonald’s coffee case where a 79-year-old woman was burned with hot coffee. In this case, the company was aware of their burn claims and had already paid some of the cases (Schiffman Law Office, 2019) . Consequently, since they had refused to help the old lady, they were fined $2.7 million and still appealed, and it was lowered to $480,000 which helped clear her medical bills. In conclusion, product liability makes manufactures accountable for the products that they produce to their consumers. They must ensure that they are adequately tested before dispatching them to the market.
References
Boop, G. (2019, November 24). How your business benefits from product liability insurance . Retrieved from https://www.thebalancesmb.com/product-liability-insurance-462597
DuBois Law Group LLC. (2019). Three types of product defects for product liability lawsuits . Retrieved from https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/three-types-of-product-defects-for-product-liability-lawsuits-24105
Schiffman Law Office. (2019 ). 7 Famous product liability cases. Retrieved from https://www.schiffmanlaw.com/7-famous-product-liability-cases/
