A product is “defective” if it causes harm or injures you due to poor design, flawed manufacturing, insufficient testing, or mislabeling/misrepresented marketing.

Poor Design

If a product wasn’t designed properly to start with it may end up being dangerous. Sometimes these products make it all the way to the marketplace before the defect is detected and they need to be recalled. However, recalls don’t work well because they are usually too late and many purchasers may never even know about the recall.

Manufacturing Defects

Even if a product is designed properly it may not be manufactured correctly. In this case there may be only some products out of a whole group that are defective. These may be recalled as well but the same problems with recalls exist in this situation.

Insufficient Testing

Especially true in auto crash testing where corporations typically test at lower speeds than you usually use their products, insufficient testing implies an inadequate amount of testing done on the product to determine its safeness.

Mislabeling/Misrepresented Marketing

When the design, manufacture, and testing of products is all done well, you can still have product defects. If the label on the product is confusing, it may still be considered defective. If instructions are written at a 10th-grade level but most consumers read at a 6th-grade to 8th-grade level, that would be another example of defective labeling. If there are absent or incomplete warning labels on a product with hidden dangers, you can file a defective product lawsuit. A neglectful or deliberate misrepresentation concerning a product may also give rise to a product liability claim.

Product defects refer to not only physical products such as cars, but also for intangible creations like gases or other chemical compounds, naturals such as pets, real estate like homes or land, and writings such as navigational maps.