Products with known dangers should be sold with instructions that contain warnings. Even something as simple as the small building blocks that hurt when you step on them should have a choking warning on them. But, what happens when these warnings aren’t present or appropriate?
There is an area of product liability known as defects in warnings. This helps to protect people who are injured when a product is manufactured and designed properly, but suffer an injury due to a lack of proper warnings about the dangers.
Manufacturers have two duties. One of these is that they have to provide instructions for how a user can use the product while avoiding dangers associated with it. The other is that they have to issue warnings about dangers that might occur with the product.
The warnings on products have to be conspicuous and clear. If you open an instruction manual for a product, you will probably notice these on the first pages or last pages of the manual. This helps the manufacturer to cover the need to have them somewhere. Some products might have them directly on the product.
Not all products require warnings. These only need to be present if the product does have a dangerous element, the danger is there when it is used as intended, the manufacturer knows about it and it isn’t blatantly obvious to the user.
Consumers are expected to abide by the warnings, so remember this when you use a product that isn’t 100-percent safe. If you are injured and using the product as it is intended to be, you might opt to seek compensation.
