Who Qualifies as a ‘Consumer’

The first step is to determine whether the person that was hurt by the defective product can qualify for the status as the ‘consumer’ of the product. To give you an idea how this may not be as easy as it may sound at first, the status of ‘consumer’ might be extended only to the person who ‘purchased’ the product (and was injured by it). Additionally, ‘consumer’ status may be extended to those persons who live in the same household as the purchaser (an example of this may be when a parent buys a toaster but a child in the family is injured when using it). Additionally, ‘consumer’ may extend even further to include those who use the product with the purchaser’s consent (an example of this may be a neighbor who borrows a lawnmower and is injured by it). Lastly, consumer may be extended to any person who uses a product in a way reasonably foreseen by the manufacturer.

Consumer’s Rights

A consumer’s most basic right is to be reasonably safe while using a product in a way a manufacturer of that product should have reasonably foreseen it would be used.

Generally, products are either ‘mis-manufactured’, or ‘mis-designed’. Mis-manufactured is when the danger from a product did not come from its ‘design’, but for some reason it was defectively made or became defective somewhere between the production plant and the consumer. Mis-designed is when a product was made/manufactured as intended, but was designed in such a way that it creates an unreasonable risk of danger to the consumer. Sometimes when a product causes harm to a consumer, there is very little, if anything, left of the product. (This may be when a product explodes, etc.). When there is little or not very much of a product left of a defective product, experts can be engaged to reconstruct it so a court can make a decision regarding the product.

Defective product cases we aggressively handle include (but are not limited to):

• Defective vehicles
• Defective guardrails
• Defective medical devices
• Defective or dangerous drugs
• Poisoning from Nicotine
• Children’s products
• Other defective products such as defective guns, firearms, appliances, etc.