Product Liability Attorney | What You Know About Product Liability Law is Wrong

Chances are, What You Know about Product Liability Law is Wrong

Most of the time, when you hear about a product liability claim, you hear information that is supposed to be sensational or to point out how ludicrous these lawsuits are. This information is usually wrong and, considering the fact that much if it comes from email forwards and other unreliable sources, it's no wonder why this is the case. Before you start thinking that these laws exist to allow people to take advantage of honest businesses, consider some of the claims.

The Horse Story

In the 80's, Forbes ran a story about a woman who was killed and whose family filed a successful lawsuit because a horse jumped through the roof of her car. The award was an impressive $1.5 million, which sounds ridiculous when the story is cast the way it was in the article: the woman struck the horse, the horse jumped through the roof and killed her. The horse, however, did not actually jump through the roof. When she struck the horse, it slid across the roof and managed to collapse it. Cars are supposed to be able to withstand the weight of a rollover accident, under which circumstances the roof would have had to bear the weight of the car. Clearly, the car was faulty in this regard and, thus, the plaintiff won.

The Coffee Story

The most famous lawsuit that everyone cites as an example of how product liability lawsuits are scams is the suit that involved McDonald's coffee. In this case, a woman was served coffee that was almost 200 degrees in temperature. She suffered third-degree burns when it spilled on her body. The reason she received an award—which was not the millions of dollars that people like to claim, it was actually slightly more than half a million—was because she required surgeries to fix the damage done to her body by the burns.

Companies are sometimes downright irresponsible with the products they put on the market. Product liability law exists so that everyday people have a way of getting compensated when they've been injured because of that irresponsibility. These laws aren't at all invitations to frivolous lawsuits and, in many cases, they provide people who are injured with viable ways to fight back against companies that have harmed them out of pure negligence. If a product has injured you and you were using it as is intended, be sure to contact an attorney about the matter!