Serious burn injuries can happen when using defective household products. These injuries can cause a lifetime of disfigurement, not to mention serious pain and medical bills. Consumers have a right to expect that the products they and their families use are reasonably safe. When this trust is violated because of product defects, victims may be able to pursue a personal injury claim with an experienced personal injury attorney in Georgia.
A variety of household products can have significant defects capable of causing burns. These may include:
- Items with faulty wiring
- Poorly manufactured toys, vehicles, or parts
- Malfunctioning kitchen appliances
- Laptop computer batteries that overheat and catch fire
- Chemical burns from household substances
- Malfunctioning heating equipment, such as furnaces, space heaters, and boilers
- Defective lawn mower gas tanks
When products are discovered to be defective, they should be recalled from the market. But this doesn’t always happen, nor does it prevent injuries from products people have already purchased and failed to return. Unfortunately, it often takes multiple people being injured before companies will react.
Georgia Code Section 51-1-11 encompasses the state’s product liability laws. Manufacturers, distributors, and sellers of defective products can be held strictly liable in Georgia for burn injuries their products cause. The term “strict liability” means that the responsible party need not have been negligent or unreasonable in its conduct. These are the requirements of pursuing a consumer product liability claim:
- The manufacturer, distributor, or seller either made the product or placed it into the stream of commerce
- The product in question was defective
- The product defect caused the victim’s burn injuries
A product defect may be caused by improper design or improper construction. The design of the product itself could be inherently unsafe, and cause burn injuries. Or the design could be safe, but the actual manufacturing of the product makes it dangerous. For example, the product could have been assembled using cheap or faulty parts. Defective products make their way to consumers for numerous reasons, such as:
- Failure to install a critical safety component on the product
- Not performing adequate safety testing before placing the product on the market
- Failure to provide sufficient safety warnings or adequate instructions
Any number of these and other oversights can result in unwitting users of the product being burned. When a consumer suffers a burn injury, he or she may be faced with the following:
- Multiple surgeries
- Painful skin grafts
- Physical therapy
- Psychological treatment and therapy
You should not have to worry that a common household product will leave you with life-altering burn injuries. Our law firm will aggressively pursue compensation for a variety of losses you suffer, including:
- Past, present, and future medical costs
- Lost wages and lost time from work
- Pain and suffering
- Rehabilitation expenses
- In cases of wrongful death, funeral expenses
Georgia product liability laws do carry deadlines, known as statutes of limitation, by which a burn victim must sue. Injured consumers have two years to file a personal injury claim resulting from a defective household products. If the item in question only caused property damage, the victim has four years to file suit. The statute of repose is ten years. This means that in many (but not all) cases, the law imposes a ten-year deadline on all product liability claims. There are other important details of Georgia’s statutes of limitation and statute of repose, and an attorney can explain those.
Contact us Today if You or a Loved One Has Been Burned By Defective Household Products
Burn injuries are serious and require aggressive legal representation to hold the responsible party accountable. The experienced Georgia injury law firm of Schneider Hammers has worked on behalf of clients who have been injured and burned by defective products. Let us go to work for you. Reach out to us today to get started with your case.
