Albuquerque Product Liability Lawyer

New Mexico Lawyers Assisting Injured Consumers

When you purchase a product, you do not expect to be injured. You assume that the manufacturer made a reasonably safe product. Unfortunately, many different products, including toys, baby products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, furniture, and appliances, may be unreasonably dangerous. If you are injured as a result of a defective product, you may have a basis to file a lawsuit. Our Albuquerque product liability lawyers at the Branch Law Firm can advise you on whether you may have a claim for compensation.

Legal Theories in Product Liability Claims

In New Mexico, a manufacturer or distributor may be held strictly liable for a defective product that causes you injuries. This means that the manufacturer or distributor may need to pay damages for injuries caused by a defective product, irrespective of how much care the manufacturer or distributor took in designing, manufacturing, or marketing the product. You will need to show an actionable defect, causation, and damages. Anybody in the distribution chain may be held accountable for injuries, including the manufacturer, designer, or seller of a product.

There are three defects that can form the basis of your product liability lawsuit: manufacturing defects, design defects, or marketing defects. In some cases, it will be necessary for a product liability attorney in New Mexico to retain an expert to establish the existence of the defect and to show that the defect is what caused the injuries. Manufacturing defects are mistakes made while the product was being built. These are usually one-offs that are not found in every product in a line. Something has gone awry while the product was being built, such that the finished product deviates from the intended design or plan. For example, if a component of an appliance’s safety feature was somehow not added in the assembly line, and the appliance unexpectedly explodes while you are using it, this would likely be a manufacturing defect.

Design flaws are not one-offs. They are flaws in how the product was designed, such that they make the product inherently dangerous. For example, if a crib is not designed to be strong enough to support a baby’s weight and collapses in on the baby, this would be a design defect. Another type of design defect could be an SUV roof that was designed such that it crushes a passenger in the event of a rollover car accident.

Marketing defects are usually failures to warn of potential hazards, but they can include any flaws in the information provided to the consumer regarding how the product is to be used that make the product dangerous. There may be a marketing defect, for example, if the manufacturer failed to provide any warnings of a serious or fatal side effect of a dangerous drug. There could also be a design defect if the manufacturer buried important warnings in small type in connection with a product that can cause burns if it is left plugged in for too long.

An Albuquerque personal injury attorney can help you pursue damages for injuries caused by a product even if you used a product in a way that was not obvious, as long as the use was foreseeable. In other words, you can hold a manufacturer or distributor liable for injuries arising out of misuse, as long as the type of misuse was foreseeable.

You may be able to pursue not only a product liability claim but also a breach of warranty claim. The warranty provisions of the UCC and product liability law are parallel legal theories, such that you can pursue both of them in the same lawsuit.

Consult an Aggressive Product Liability Lawyer in New Mexico

If you are able to establish your product liability claim, you may be able to recover compensation for your economic and noneconomic losses. The Branch Law Firm provides skillful legal representation to people bringing personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits in New Mexico due to injuries caused by defective products. We also represent consumers in communities such as Albuquerque, Roswell, Clovis, Las Cruces, Carlsbad, Hobbs, Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Farmington, Las Vegas, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe, Taos, Belen, and Los Lunas. Call us toll-free at (505) 243-3500 or use our contact page to set up an appointment.