If you recently bought a new product, whether because you needed it around the home or for pure entertainment, you’re likely rather happy. But if you bought a product with that mindset and later it turns out the product was defective, worse that it caused injuries either to yourself or your family, you may be rightfully quite irritated. Keep reading to learn about the compensation available to you in Connecticut in defective products cases, then make a call to the office of a Hartford County personal injury attorney. We know how frustrating it can be to have our busy lives disrupted by a product we hoped would instead be helpful. Count on us to stand by your side and get you the best compensation we can.
Defective Products Categories in Connecticut Law
In Connecticut, there are several kinds of defective products that, if these have resulted in an injury, a death, or property damage, you will have the right to bring a claim. It may be a product defective in its design or its manufacture, which we’ll talk more about in this article. But the defect may also lay in its construction, formula, preparation, assembly, installation, testing, instructions, warnings, packaging, or labeling.
There are many ways a defect in any of these categories can happen. A manufacturing defect, for instance, can happen during the production of the item, entirely independent of the design, which itself may have been quite safe. On the other hand, design defects result from a flaw in the design, meaning the plan or drawings used to demonstrate how to build the item.
Connecticut Product Liability Act and Defective Product Claims
In Connecticut, the Product Liability Act governs defective product claims based on negligence, strict liability, and breach of warranty. In negligence claims, courts will consider many factors, such as customer satisfaction and the risks and benefits of a particular design. In breach of warranty cases, the courts analyze whether the manufacturer had a duty to warn users of dangerous product features.
When strict liability cases come up, the plaintiff has space to prepare powerful arguments. A plaintiff has a case when they can show that a product is defective, that said defect was the closest cause of the injury, death, or property damage that followed, that the defect was present when the product left the seller’s care, that the seller never expected the product to be altered, and that it in fact wasn’t altered. This is true even if the plaintiff did not originally purchase from the seller. Strict liability doesn’t require the plaintiff to demonstrate how the seller was negligent, only that the product was defective and that this defect caused the harm that caused the claim to arise.
