Subject: Design Defect Standards

California [Again] Confronts the High Cost of Litigation Uncertainty

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The first appellate shoe has dropped in the litigation involving the herbicide Roundup, Johnson v. Monsanto Co., decided July 20, 2020, by California’s 1st District Court of Appeal, Division One. We discussed the verdict and the trial court’s post-trial rulings here, and we now follow through with an update.

Initially, the price tag for allowing questionable science into the courtroom, as measured by this verdict, has been reduced. The court of appeal lowered the compensatory damages award from $39 million to about $10.25 million, concluding the jury had improperly awarded noneconomic damages that plaintiff would likely never suffer. Because plaintiff’s counsel had argued to the jury that plaintiff’s Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma had reduced his future life expectancy to two years, the jury could not award pain and suffering damages beyond that two-year span. And, agreeing with the trial court that constitutional limits required a 1:1 ratio between compensatory and punitive damages, the court slashed the $78 million punitive award to about $10.5 million.

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Uncertain Expectations – California’s Long Struggle with How to Measure Defectiveness in a Product’s Design (Part 3)

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Recap:  Part 1 (here) discussed the background of the consumer expectations test (CET) and part 2 (here) described the California Supreme Court’s seemingly definitive decision in Soule v. General Motors Corp., 8 Cal.4th 548 (1994) explaining the types of cases where CET can be applied.

Any expectation by legal consumers that Soule’s careful guidance would produce coherence and consistency was overly optimistic. The courts’ conceptual struggles in the wake of Soule are best illustrated by a string of decisions in cases that, like Soule, deal with “crashworthiness” or “enhanced injury.” These cases allege that the vehicle failed to adequately protect the occupant in a crash.

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Uncertain Expectations – California’s Long Struggle with How to Measure Defectiveness in a Product’s Design (Part 2)

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Recap:  The background and prior post for this multi-part series can be found here.

In 1994, the California Supreme Court took up Soule v. General Motors Corp., 8 Cal.4th 548 (1994), to provide much-needed guidance as to when it is and is not appropriate to allow a jury to decide the design defect issue based on the consumer expectations test (CET). “Much-needed” may be an understatement – trial courts routinely allowed plaintiffs freely to elect what design defect standard the jury would consider, often both CET and the risk-benefit test (RBT), gaining the proverbial two bites at the apple, and the courts of appeal had not prescribed any meaningful limiting theory or principle.

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Uncertain Expectations – California’s Long Struggle with How to Measure Defectiveness in a Product’s Design

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In the 50-plus years since the inception of the doctrine of strict products liability in tort, a vexing issue for product manufacturers has been how to evaluate and defend against accusations of design defect. Manufacturing defects are relatively easy to evaluate – something either did or did not go wrong on the assembly line, the product either did or did not conform to specifications. But except for the rare and extreme cases where, in hindsight, the design is so clearly misguided that no reasonable engineer would consider it safe, courts, commentators and lawyers have hotly debated the proper benchmark to judge the alleged defectiveness of an entire product line.

Manufacturers like to know what to expect. Without a concrete liability standard, they cannot confidently design their products to satisfy it, and they cannot rationally evaluate their liability exposure when they get sued. Even better for manufacturers would be a standard that actually makes sense, and is reasonably attainable.

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