If you were injured by a defective product, your lawsuit will fall under an area of law called product liability. Defective products are involved in many types of accident cases ranging from car accidents, to structure fires, to drug injuries and complications after surgery involving medical devices. Sometimes it is immediately obvious that a defective product was the cause of the accident or injury. More often, it takes time for the truth about a defective product to surface and, in many cases, it takes diligent investigation on the part of an experienced accident attorney.
Defective Products
Any type of product can be defective. Some are more commonly defective in ways that cause injuries and death. Examples include:
- Vehicles and their parts
- Medications
- Medical devices
- Children’s products such as cribs, clothing, and child safety seats
- Children’s toys
- Electronics, including their batteries and battery chargers
- Heavy equipment
- Power and air tools
- Machinery
- Lawn and garden equipment
- Gas grills
- Ladders
- Cleaning supplies
- Furniture, including TV’s and dressers that tip over too easily
- Heaters
- Electric blankets
- Food
- Safety equipment, such as smoke and carbon monoxide detectors
Accidents and injuries caused by defective products can be deceptive. For instance, an auto accident may appear to all witnesses to be the fault of one of the drivers, when it was actually caused by faulty brakes or unintended acceleration. Victims of defective medical devices often believe their injuries were caused by medical malpractice.
It gets even more complicated when more than one defective product is involved. When a house fire is started by a faulty electronic device, and then the people inside are severely injured or die because the smoke detectors were defective, it takes highly skilled and dedicated attorney, working with skilled investigators, to get to the bottom of what happened and who was responsible.
To learn more about defective products and the role a defective product may have played in your accident, please call the Bristol product liability attorneys of Hunter, Smith & Davis, LLP, at (423) 378-8830 or (423) 378-8862.
