Houston Personal Injury Lawyers
Have you been injured because a product was unsafe? If so, you may be entitled to compensation from the manufacturer. Manufacturers are required to make sure any products they put into the marketplace are safe. If you have been injured because a product was dangerous or defective, you deserve justice.
At The Law Offices of Hilda Sibrian™, our experienced product liability attorneys are ready to fight for your right to full and fair compensation. We have the skills and the resources to hold large corporations accountable for harming innocent consumers.
Contact us today to get started with a free case review.
When a company puts defective products on the market, they put you at risk. The most common types of defective products include:
No matter what type of product caused you harm, you should speak to an attorney about your legal rights immediately.
In Houston, The Law Offices of Hilda Sibrian™ is proud to serve injured clients and help them get the compensation they deserve. Book your free consultation today!
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Imagine for a second that you bought a brand-new, top-of-the-line toaster. Right out of the box, you plug it in. But because of a faulty design, it immediately catches on fire, causing severe injuries and property damage. All the sudden, everything you owned is gone, you are drowning in medical bills, and nothing was your fault. How can you get your life back?
Product liability laws are in place to protect you in these types of situations. Whoever manufactured that defective toaster should have to pay for your losses, including any injuries caused by the fire. Oftentimes, these defective products enter the marketplace because companies cut corners to make a profit. You shouldn’t have to pay the price.
Products can be defective in their design, manufacturing, or for a failure to warn.
A defective design means that when the product was created, there was a way to make the product safer, but the design did not include the safe alternative. Let’s think back to our toaster. If the fire started because of a cheap heating coil, and a more expensive version of that coil would not have caused a fire, then the toaster was defective by design.
A manufacturing defect would be if something happened in the factory where the toaster was made. All the other toasters don’t have this problem, so it’s not a problem with the design of the toaster, but when your toaster was made, someone accidently misaligned it and the heating coil was incorrectly inserted into the toaster. In this case, the defect in the manufacturing caused the fire.
When a product has certain features or functions that could be dangerous if not used correctly, the manufacture has a duty to warn of the danger. If there are no warnings or labels, then there is a failure to warn. If our toaster had some fancy removable knobs or switches that were small enough to choke on, and they don’t have any warning material about a choking hazard, that is a failure to warn.
You may be entitled to various forms of compensation, depending on the facts of your case. The goal of a product liability claim, generally, is to restore the injured party to the position he or she was in before the accident happened, as much as the law is able to do so. That is to say, with money. Most compensation is considered “compensatory damages,” because they are compensating you for your losses.
Some types of losses are easily quantified. If you have medical bills that you paid as a result of the accident, that needs to be reimbursed. If you missed days or weeks of work as a result of the accident, then you are owed the wages that you lost.
Other compensatory damages are harder to quantify, such as pain and suffering. The best way to quantify this is to ask yourself: “How much money would someone have to pay me, to voluntarily make myself go through the amount of pain I’m in?”
The most common compensatory damages include:
When calculating damages, it is important to take into consideration future losses you expect to face, as well. This includes future treatment needs, loss of earning potential, long-term care needs, etc.
In Texas, there is a statute that puts limitations on when a lawsuit can be filed for certain types of claims. These statutes are created so that claims are litigated timely, the evidence is fresh during the dispute, and so people can move on with their lives without worry of what happened years and years in the past.
Under Texas law, the statute of limitations for both personal injury claims as well as property damage is two years. If more than two years have eclipsed since the day of the accident, then no lawsuit will be allowed to be filed.
If you’ve been injured by a defective or unsafe product, gather all the documents, pictures, and records that you have. Keep all your medical bills. Keep the product (but don’t use it anymore, of course), and keep anything else that may be relevant. Next, and the most important step, call the defective product liability lawyers at The Law Offices of Hilda Sibrian™ today! We can discuss your legal rights in a free consultation.
