Unfortunately, it can be difficult to win a product liability case.John N. Demas is an attorney specializing in the field of personal injury law. A founding partner at Demas & Rosenthal, LLP, he has spent 20 years representing injured victims in Sacramento, California. In this article, he explains why it can be difficult to win a product liability lawsuit.
A product liability case is a lawsuit in which a person was injured or hurt in some way due to a defective product. As a general rule of thumb, these cases can be particularly difficult to win for a couple of different reasons.
First, I would say the reason it is tough to win a product liability case oftentimes is because you—the plaintiff—are usually up against a massive corporation with massive resources to devote to their own defense. Typically, when you are talking about filing a product liability lawsuit, you are talking about going up against some of the largest companies in the world. And these companies will, by and large, stop at nothing when it comes to winning their case.
Corporations have all the financial resources as well as the incentive, to prevail in these cases, because the last thing their company wants is for one of their products to be found defective by a jury. A verdict like that, where it has been found that a product wasn’t made properly, could have widespread impact on the corporation, its manufacturers, and its shareholders, which is why these big companies are willing to devote so many resources to defending themselves against product liability lawsuits.
With so much at stake, corporations are usually unlikely to simply settle in these types of major cases. Instead, they will fight tooth and nail to prove that their product was not dangerous or ineffective. That’s why it is so important that you hire a lawyer who has experience in the area, who can fight back just as hard.
Oftentimes, even sustaining an injury from one of these products isn’t enough to necessarily win your case. Even when you feel that you have all the evidence you will need, you still need to get an experienced attorney on your side to level out the playing field with these massive corporations. After all, they have attorneys on their side who specialize in defending against these accusations on a full-time basis.
Finally, another reason individuals have such a hard time winning product liability cases is because they are expensive—plain and simple. These types of cases are labor intensive, on the part of the law firm involved, and require plenty of expert witnesses who can testify about the products and the injuries sustained by the defective product. Finding these experts is a labor-intensive process that doesn’t come cheap, and most individuals simply don’t have the resources at their disposal to hire this kind of representation, like a major corporation likely has.
The type of litigation you need to successfully win a product liability case is not cheap. It is expensive litigation. And it is high stakes litigation because potentially an entire company’s product line is at stake with this kind of case.
So overall, if someone asked me why a product liability case is so difficult to win, I would tell him it’s because the massive corporations being sued in these situations are so unlikely to roll over and settle, and because building a case that can stand up to these guys is both expensive and labor intensive—and most individuals simply don’t have the resources to do that.
Here at Demas & Rosenthal, though, we actually handle many of these types of cases. Because of our experience, we are fully equipped to handle even the most extensive of these cases. So if people want their best chances at winning their case against a large corporation, they would be smart to choose a law firm with years of experience and expertise in the area, like Demas & Rosenthal, to take on their case.
