Product Liability Lawyer in Oklahoma City

As a strict liability state for product liability, Oklahoma allows injured consumers to hold manufacturers responsible for injuries caused by their defective products, regardless of whether the manufacturer acted carelessly or recklessly in designing or manufacturing the product. However, statutory law provides manufacturers an affirmative defense to product liability for a product that the public recognizes as inherently unsafe if:

• The manufacturer intended the product for personal consumption,
• The product’s utility outweighed the risks created by its use,
• The product reached the consumer without substantial change to its condition, and
• The manufacturer provided adequate warnings of the product’s risk.

Furthermore, statutory law also creates a rebuttable presumption against liability for manufacturers for injuries caused by some aspect of the formulation, labeling, or design of the product if it complied with mandatory federal safety standards or regulations, unless an injured party proves that:

• Federal standards or regulations failed to adequately protect the public from harm. or
• The manufacturer mispresented the product’s compliance with federal standards and regulations. 

An injured consumer might have one of the three primary types of product liability claims, which include:

• Design defect: A design defect claim alleges that the product’s specifications make it inherently unsafe for use.
• Manufacturing defect: A manufacturing defect claim alleges that a product suffered some issue during the fabrication or assembly process that caused it to deviate from otherwise safe design specifications, and that defect rendered the product unsafe for use.
• Failure to warn: Also called an informational or marketing defect, a failure-to-warn claim alleges that a product came with inadequate instructions for its safe use or insufficient warnings regarding the inherent risks of using the product.