If you are hurt in Nevada by any type of defective product, you may be entitled to monetary compensation against the product’s manufacturer, designer, distributor, importer, seller, or anyone else in the distribution train. This type of personal injury case falls under tort law, which includes civil claims, as opposed to criminal charges, alleging a victim suffered a loss or harm, resulting in legal responsibility for the party that committed the tortious act.
Different Product Liability Claims
Before filing a claim, however, it is important to know that there are different types of product liability lawsuits. Specifically those alleging:
- Design defects: Alleging that the product is inherently dangerous by virtue of how it is designed, instead of any other reason. A product is defective due to its design if its condition is unreasonably dangerous, even if it were produced exactly as designed.
- Manufacturing defects: the most common cause of product liability lawsuits, a manufacturing defect claim alleges that while the original design of the product was safe, something occurred during the manufacturing process that made the product dangerous. When a product is defectively manufactured, it does not comply with the intended design and fails to perform safely as it was designed to do;
- Marketing defects: when there is a defect in the labeling, warning, or advertising of the product, an injured party claims that the product had an inherent danger and the manufacturer failed to warn, or did a bad job warning, the consumer about this danger. While manufacturers are not required to warn consumers about every possible risk, they are mandated to work about risks that are discoverable based on both the generally recognized and prevailing best information available.
In all instances, the product fails to perform as safely as the ordinary user would expect when used as intended, or in a reasonably foreseeable manner, and the danger of the design outweighs the benefits.
Recovering Compensation
If you were injured by a defective product in Nevada, you may be able to recover monetary compensation for harm suffered. Unless strict liability applies, winning your case will boil down to establishing negligence on the part of the defendant(s). If the defendant(s) breached a legal duty owed and their failure to act caused the injury, then negligence has likely been established. The main elements of a product liability case based on the theory of negligence include:
- The defendant was liable for the consumers’ care when the product was in use, and this care was not met;
- The defendant’s failure to meet this duty of care for the consumer led to the injury; and
- The consumer suffered damages as a result of the injury.
While these are the basic elements of establishing negligence in a Nevada product liability case, it is important to understand that it is just a starting point as these cases can become quite complicated. They often require expert testimony as well as in-depth inquiries into the duties and rights of the parties involved in the lawsuit.
Contact Our Attorneys
If you or a loved one has been hurt in Nevada due to a defective product, you may have a valid product liability claim. Contact our Las Vegas personal injury attorneys at H&P Law. Our skilled lawyers will fight for the compensation you deserve. Contact us today.
