Los Angeles Product liability, under California law, can be defined as the accountability of all the responsible parties engaged in the production of certain goods for any harm or damage brought about by the product.

Types of Liability

There are three major types of product liability claims:

Manufacturing defect These are defects that took place during the manufacturing of the product. This is usually caused by low quality materials or shady workmanship.
Design Defects These are defects are associated with the products design. The design may be inherently dangerous or useless no matter how good or carefully the product is manufactured.
Failure To Warn Defect These defects refer to some of the non-obvious dangers of the product that can be prevented through proper warnings to the users. These defects can be present despite careful design and production.
Theories Associated with Product Liability.
Product liability in the United States is usually associated with these major claims: Negligence, Breach of Warranty, and Consumer Protection claims.
Negligence A negligence claim includes proof of duty owed, a breach of that duty, an injury and that the breach caused the injury.

Another concept of Negligence is Negligence per se or when you use a manufacturers violation of a regulation instead of proof of duty and breach.

Breach of Warranty - A warranty refers to statements by a manufacturer or seller about a product during a commercial transaction. Warranty claims usually require a privity between the injured person and the manufacturer or seller or means that the buyer and manufacturer must be directly dealing with each other.

Three types of warranty based product liability claims. These are the breach of:

oExpress Warranty This is a breach of the guarantee stated or implied by the manufacturer or seller. This happens when that promise or guarantee is broken, i.e., if a product is defective or not as should be expected by a reasonable buyer.

oImplied Warranty of merchantability This breach happens when a product does not meet an ordinary buyers expectations. The product should be as they said it is, i.e., a product sold looks good but when opened it is discovered that it has hidden defects not disclosed by seller.

oImplied Warranty of fitness for a particular purpose - This breach happens when the buyer lets the seller choose the product to fit a specific request but the product chosen did not perform or fit the purpose as said by the seller

Strict Liability Under this concept, the manufacturer is liable for the defective product even if they were not negligent in producing the defective product.

The problem with negligence is that the victim has the burden to prove that the manufacturers behavior during production is below par. So even if a victim is severely injured he/she may not be compensated unless she proves the manufacturers negligence.

California was the first state to assert the doctrine of strict liability and is soon followed by other states.

The point of strict liability is that if both manufacturer and buyer were not negligent but still results to injury. One should still cover the cost of the injury and the manufacturer should be the one to cover that cost.

Consumer Protection Most states have their own consumer protection laws that provide specific remedies for various product defects.

An example of this is the Lemon Laws that provide a remedy for buyers of cars that fail to meet quality standards. In Los Angeles, the Lemon law covers anything mechanical.

Laws regarding product liability are pretty complex and may leave an ordinary person confused. So if you sustained injury from a defective product consult a product liability attorney to help you in pursuing your cases.