March 2023 - Faegre Drinker on Products

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Dismissal of a Broken Chair Claim Shows That Expert Testimony May Be Essential Even for a “Simple” Product

In Mehner v. Furniture Design Studios, Inc., 2023 WL 2351688 (D. Neb. Mar. 3, 2023), the court granted summary judgment on product defect claims by a plaintiff allegedly injured by the collapse of a restaurant chair eight years after the manufacturer delivered it. This well-reasoned decision reminds us that even for fairly simple products, expert proof may be required to establish a defect – and failure to develop the factual predicate in discovery may leave the plaintiff without an opinion (and without a case). It also highlights important limitations in the “malfunction theory” that sometimes allows a plaintiff to proceed without expert proof or identification of a specific defect.

Plaintiff was eating at a restaurant in Omaha when his chair allegedly collapsed. He sued Furniture Design Studios (FDS), which designed, manufactured and sold the chair, asserting strict liability and negligence design defect claims.

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Tort Reform Comes to Florida

The new law should limit the overall tort liability confronted by all types of companies and individuals who find themselves facing a lawsuit in Florida. This update focuses on the changes for statutes of limitation, comparative negligence and the admissibility of evidence of medical charges at trial. Florida courts will undoubtedly see many challenges to the new law over the next few years.

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Where No Forum Contacts “Relate To” Claims at Issue, Ninth Circuit Affirms Dismissal for Lack of Specific Personal Jurisdiction

Specific personal jurisdiction can be a very straightforward concept. If a plaintiff claims to have been injured by a product that the defendant itself sold directly to plaintiff at a store within the forum state, disputes over specific personal jurisdiction would be rare. Other cases can be closer calls, particularly when a defendant has extensive contacts within a forum but none of them are causally related to the plaintiff’s claims. At what point does a defendant’s purposeful availment of a forum cease to be “related to” a plaintiff’s claims? The Ninth Circuit offered some helpful guidance on that issue in its decision in Yamashita v. LG Chem, Ltd., — F.4th —, 2023 WL 2374776 (9th Cir. Mar. 6, 2023).

Plaintiff in Yamashita was a Hawaii resident who brought a personal injury/products liability suit in Hawaii state court. The suit named two defendants. The first was a South Korean company that manufactured a battery that Plaintiff alleged had caused him injury. The second, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of the South Korean company, was a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Georgia. It did not manufacture the product at issue but distributed it within the United States. Both defendants denied ever selling the product directly to individual consumers. The defendants removed the case to the District Court for the District of Hawaii and moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. The district court granted the motion, and Plaintiff appealed.

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Texas Supreme Court Refocuses on Causation and Affirms Summary Judgment in Herbicide Drift Case

The question of whether a particular application of herbicide on one property caused damage on another’s property requires expert testimony. When a plaintiff claims that herbicide drift caused reduced crop yields, it is not enough for an expert to opine merely that the drift caused damage to plants – the plaintiff must establish that the defendant’s application of the herbicide caused the reduced crop yield. The distinction may sound nuanced but can have profound ramifications on litigation. This is well illustrated in the Texas Supreme Court’s recent decision in Helena Chemical Company v. Cox, — S.W. 3d –, 2023 WL 2335694 (Tex. Mar. 3, 2023), an important and highly followed case focusing on the causation requirement in cases alleging yield loss to a crop from alleged exposure to pesticides.

The plaintiffs in Cox were cotton farmers who alleged that the defendant had supervised an aerial application of herbicide that drifted onto plaintiffs’ properties and damaged their crops, causing reduced yields. A government inspector conducted a visual inspection of the damaged crops and claimed to find “markers” for the herbicide’s two active ingredients, but no lab testing was performed. The inspector also identified no “consistent pattern” or “drift pattern” of crop damage over the large area encompassing the various plaintiffs’ noncontiguous properties. Plaintiffs disclosed a slate of experts to support their allegations, but the trial court excluded the experts and granted summary judgment to the defendant. The court of appeals reversed, finding the experts admissible despite their inability to trace the alleged drift of the herbicide in question from defendants’ application site to plaintiffs’ properties.

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Class Action Filings on the Rise in Europe, Especially in Product Liability Cases Ahead of Full Implementation of the EU’s Representative Actions Directive

Under the timeline imposed by the EU’s Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Representative Actions for the Protection of the Collective Interests of Consumers, the EU’s 27 member states were required to provide a collective litigation option to consumers by December 25, 2022, including by adopting or amending national law in jurisdictions where mechanisms for such litigation were not previously established. By June 25, 2023, member states are required to implement and begin applying these new mechanisms. But while that process is still ongoing, multiple EU member states have already taken legislative action to permit greater collective litigation mechanisms than previously available in their respective jurisdictions. Additionally, legal industry observers have already noted the increased presence of plaintiffs’ firms and litigation funders in the EU in response to the greater and increasing availability of representative and collective redress actions. See K. Henderson, Z. Okanyi, et al., European Class Action Report 2022, at 2, CMS (2022), available at https://cms.law/en/int/publication/cms-european-class-actions-report-2022.

In particular, one study noted that class action filings in Europe had increased more than 120% over the last five years (from 49 in 2018 to 110 in 2021), propelled by greater attention to potential mass actions by plaintiffs’ firms and increased availability of litigation funding. The data confirms what practitioners in this space already know: the plaintiffs’ bar in the EU is not waiting for the full implementation of the Representative Actions Directive. Of particular note, this rise is fueled, in significant part, by product liability, personal injury, and consumer mass actions.

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