Products liability is a legal term for a type of case where someone is injured due to a defective or improperly designed product. These cases are very difficult to win and usually require the attorney handling the case to seek the assistance of an engineer who can tell the jury why the product is dangerous and how it could have been designed in such a way that would have prevented an injury.
One case we handled a few years ago involved a folding camp table which was kept open by the use of several small bungee cords with metal clips on their ends (similar to a bungee cord tie-down straps). The way this table was designed made it very difficult to place the hook end into the appropriate hole without actually bending down to look at the hole as you placed the hook. Unfortunately, this placed your face in the path of the bungee hook should you have failed to put the hook all the way through the hole. My client was a 16 year-old boy who let go of the bungee cord thinking he had hit the hole. When he let go, the cord snapped back and the metal hook hit his eye causing a permanent loss of vision in the eye. The engineer we hired on that case stated that a thirty-cent design change could have totally prevented this accident. Because of this report, we secured a very large settlement for our client.