Richmond Product Liability Attorney

Virginia is one of a small number of states that never adopted strict liability for defective products, and almost nobody injured by one finds that out until a lawyer tells them. It means proving that the product hurt you is not enough. You have to prove that a company was careless, or that it broke a promise the law reads into every sale. That single difference decides which claims succeed here, and it changes what has to be preserved in the first week. Tronfeld West & Durrett has represented injured Virginians since 1972, and our Richmond personal injury attorneys will tell you in a free consultation which route your case can actually take.

Free Consultation With a Richmond Product Liability Attorney

Product cases are decided by evidence that is easy to lose, so the first conversation is largely about protecting it:

• What the product is, who made it, who sold it, and whether you still have it.
• How you were using it, what the instructions and warnings said, and whether anything had been modified or removed.
• Whether the manufacturer, seller, or an insurer has already asked you to return the item for testing, which is a request to hand over the case.
• Whether the product has been recalled, and whether other users have reported the same failure.

That call reaches a live person at Tronfeld West & Durrett at no obligation, and there is no fee unless we win. Where the facts warrant it, our preservation letters go out immediately so the product, the maintenance records, and any comparable units stay where they are.

For answers to your questions about a product liability in Richmond, call:
800-321-6741

Virginia Does Not Apply Strict Liability to Defective Products

In most of the country a manufacturer that puts a dangerous product into the marketplace answers for the resulting injuries regardless of how careful it was. Virginia rejected that approach and has never adopted it. Here an injured person proceeds on negligence, on breach of warranty, or on both together.

The practical effect is that the claim turns on the company’s conduct or its promises rather than on the condition of the product alone. Under a negligence theory the ordinary elements of a negligence claim apply: the manufacturer owed a duty of reasonable care in designing, making, or warning about the product, it breached that duty, and the breach caused your injury. That is a heavier lift than strict liability. It is also why these files need engineering analysis, testing standards, and internal company documents rather than simply a broken object in a box.

It is not a reason to walk away from a claim. It is a reason to have one evaluated properly and early, because the difference between a case that is built for Virginia law and one that is not shows up long before trial.

The Three Types of Product Defect

Whichever theory the claim proceeds under, the defect itself normally falls into one of three categories.

Design Defects

The product is dangerous because the design is, which means every unit that left the factory carries the same hazard. A machine with no guard over a moving blade, a vehicle roof that cannot support its own weight in a rollover, a chair that fails under ordinary load, an appliance built without a standard shutoff. These claims turn on whether a safer alternative design was both feasible and known when the product was made, and they are usually proven with engineering testimony, industry standards, and the manufacturer’s own testing files. An unguarded blade is also how a routine task ends in an amputation.

Manufacturing Defects

The design is sound and the production line is not: a weld that did not hold, a contaminated batch, a fastener torqued wrong, a component left out. These are frequently the most provable defects, because the unit that injured you can be measured directly against the manufacturer’s own specification. That comparison is only possible if the item still exists, which is why the preservation question matters more here than anywhere else in injury law.

Failure to Warn and Marketing Defects

The product is built as intended, but a risk that is not obvious goes unwarned, or the instructions make unsafe use predictable. Gas appliances, chemicals, medications, power tools, and industrial equipment generate most of these claims. If the directions were confusing, the warning was buried or missing, or the hazard was one no ordinary user would anticipate, the failure is in what the company told you rather than in what it built. The resulting injuries frequently include severe burns and crush injuries.

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Breach of Warranty: The Second Path

Virginia’s version of the Uniform Commercial Code opens a route that does not require proving carelessness at all. Under Va. Code § 8.2-314, a merchant who sells goods provides an implied warranty of merchantability, meaning the goods are fit for the ordinary purposes for which such goods are used. A product that injures someone during ordinary, intended use was arguably not fit for that purpose, and the claim proceeds from there rather than from what the company knew.

A second warranty runs alongside it. Va. Code § 8.2-315 covers goods sold for a particular purpose the seller knew about, which reaches equipment specified for a job it could not safely do. This path matters a great deal in vehicle cases, where a failed restraint, tire, or airbag turns an ordinary car accident into a claim against a manufacturer.

Warranty claims carry their own complications:

• Disclaimers. A seller can limit what a warranty promises, within the limits the code sets.
• Notice. The seller has to be told of the breach, and late notice can cost an otherwise good claim.
• Who is covered. Whether an injured person who did not buy the product qualifies as a beneficiary is its own question, and it comes up constantly when the injured person is a family member, a guest, or an employee.

Because a warranty claim asks whether the product met a standard rather than whether a company was careless, we plead it alongside a negligence count so the case does not rest entirely on proving what a manufacturer knew and when.

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Products That Most Often Injure Virginians

Defect claims reach far beyond the recalls that make national news.

• Vehicles and vehicle components. Airbags that fail to deploy or deploy without cause, defective tires, seat back and restraint failures, fuel system fires, and roof structures that collapse in a rollover.
• Machinery, power tools, and industrial equipment. Missing or defeated guarding, unexpected startup, and controls that fail in a foreseeable way. These produce the most severe extremity injuries in the state.
• Household appliances and gas equipment. Dryers, water heaters, furnaces, and connectors that leak, overheat, or ignite.
• Medical devices and implants. Hardware that fractures, migrates, corrodes, or was never adequately tested for the population using it.
• Children’s products. Cribs, car seats, strollers, and toys with entrapment, strangulation, or ingestion hazards.
• Chemicals and consumer solvents. Inadequate labeling, missing protective instructions, and unwarned reactions.
• Ladders, scaffolding, and recreational equipment. Structural failures under loads the product was rated to carry.

If your injury involved equipment that failed while you were using it the way anyone would, it is worth a call even if the product is obscure and no recall exists.

Injuries Defective Products Cause

Defect cases tend to produce the most severe injuries in personal injury practice, because the failure happens with the user’s hands, body, or entire weight committed to the product.

• Amputations and crush injuries. Machinery and power tool failures, frequently involving a lifetime of prosthetic cost.
• Burn injuries. Explosions, fires, chemical exposure, and electrical faults, with grafting and reconstruction that continues for years.
• Traumatic brain injuries. Falls from failed equipment and impacts from components that separate under load.
• Spinal cord injuries. Restraint and structural failures in vehicles, and falls from ladders and scaffolding.
• Bone fractures. Complex and comminuted fractures requiring hardware and repeat surgery.
• Internal injuries. Organ damage from crush mechanisms and from devices that fail inside the body.
• Fatal injuries. Where a defective product kills someone, Virginia gives specific family members a wrongful death claim on their own behalf.

Injuries at this level sit alongside our catastrophic injury cases, and they are valued from a life care plan covering decades that have not happened yet rather than from the bills that exist when the first offer arrives.

What to Do After a Defective Product Injury

What you do in the first week frequently decides whether the claim can be proven at all.

1. Keep the product exactly as it is. Do not clean it, repair it, test it, or take it apart. The condition it was in when it failed is the evidence.
2. Do not send it back. Manufacturers and retailers routinely offer to inspect or replace the item. A product that goes back rarely returns, and the case usually goes with it.
3. Keep everything that came with it. The box, the manual, the warning labels, the warranty paperwork, the receipt, and any packaging or spare parts.
4. Photograph the scene before anything moves. The product in position, the surrounding area, your injuries, and any warning label as it actually appeared.
5. Preserve the purchase trail. Order confirmations, card statements, and delivery records establish who sold it and when, which drives both the defendants and the deadlines.
6. Write down exactly what you were doing. Step by step, while it is fresh, including anything that seemed unusual before the failure.
7. Get medical care the same day and describe the mechanism accurately. How the injury happened belongs in the record from the first visit.
8. Report it, but say little. A recall report or a complaint to the seller is fine. A recorded statement about your own conduct is not.
9. Call a lawyer before anything is discarded. Our attorneys can take the preservation question off your plate the same day.

What Your Claim Can Recover

Damages here are measured by the harm the failure caused, and in serious defect cases the largest components are the ones that have not been billed yet.

Economic Damages

Emergency treatment, surgery, hospitalization, rehabilitation, prosthetics and their lifetime replacement, home and vehicle modification, in-home care, prescriptions, and travel to treatment. Lost wages come next, and where the injury limits what you can return to, diminished earning capacity is projected across your remaining working years. We use vocational and economic experts in serious files so that long-term loss is a calculation rather than an assertion.

Non-Economic Damages

Physical pain, permanent disfigurement, loss of function, sleep disruption, and the activities and independence the injury has taken from you. How pain and suffering is valued depends heavily on how clearly the daily consequences were documented while they were happening.

Punitive Damages

Virginia permits punitive damages only for willful or wanton conduct, and Va. Code § 8.01-38.1 caps any award at $350,000. In product cases the question is usually what the manufacturer knew. Internal testing that identified the hazard, prior claims of the same failure, or a decision to keep selling after a known risk emerged is the sort of record that supports the claim.

Deadlines: Two Years for the Injury, Something Else for the Warranty

The deadline depends on which theory the claim rests on, and the two are not the same.

A personal injury claim carries a two-year deadline running from the date of injury under Va. Code § 8.01-243, and the general rules on the statute of limitations for personal injury claims apply normally. A breach of warranty claim is a contract action instead. Va. Code § 8.01-246 gives five years for a written contract and three years for an unwritten one, generally running from the date of delivery rather than the date of injury.

That difference occasionally means a warranty claim has already expired while an injury claim is still live, or the reverse, which is a reason to have both routes evaluated early rather than assuming a single deadline governs everything. In practice, preserving the product matters more than the calendar. A defective appliance, tool, or vehicle component that gets discarded, repaired, or returned takes the case with it, because the physical evidence is what an engineer needs to establish the defect at all.

Contributory Negligence and the Misuse Defense

Virginia’s pure contributory negligence rule applies to product cases exactly as it applies everywhere else in this state’s injury law, and here it merges with the misuse defense manufacturers raise in nearly every file.

• What misuse looks like in practice. That you ignored a warning, removed or defeated a guard, kept using a damaged tool, skipped maintenance, or used the product for something nobody intended.
• Why it is not a discount. One percent of fault bars recovery completely, so an early suggestion that you were partially at fault is an attempt to end the claim rather than to price it. The gap between comparative and contributory negligence is the reason a claim that would succeed elsewhere can fail here.
• Assumption of risk. A related defense arguing you knew the danger and proceeded anyway. It is answered with proof of what an ordinary user would actually have understood from the warnings provided.
• What defeats both. Evidence that you used the product the way an ordinary person would, that the hazard was not obvious, and that the warning was absent or inadequate. That record starts at the first meeting, while the product and its instructions are still in the condition they were in when you were hurt.

Virginia’s contributory negligence rule also gives every defendant an incentive to point at your conduct instead of their own, which is why these cases should not be handled casually.

Why Choose Tronfeld West & Durrett?

Elizabeth West is one of the three shareholders at Tronfeld West & Durrett, and her practice covers serious injury claims across Virginia. Here is her perspective on defective product claims in Richmond.

“The first question in one of these cases is never legal. It is where the thing is. I have had people call me having already mailed the failed part back to the company that made it, because a very polite person on the phone asked them to, and at that point there is often nothing left to test. Keep the product, keep the box, keep the manual, and call somebody before you agree to anything. Everything else in the case can be rebuilt. That cannot.”

Do You Have a Claim?

These situations are worth a conversation:

• Equipment, a tool, or a machine failed while you were using it normally and you were seriously hurt.
• A vehicle component such as a tire, airbag, seat, or restraint failed in a crash and made the injuries far worse than the collision should have.
• An appliance, heater, or gas connector caught fire, leaked, or exploded.
• A medical device or implant fractured, migrated, or had to be removed.
• You were injured by a product that was later recalled, or that you have since learned others have reported.
• The manufacturer, retailer, or an insurer has asked you to return the item, and you have not yet done so.

What Cases Like Yours Have Recovered

Our results in cases involving equipment and machinery failures include a $4,000,000 settlement, recorded as the sixth largest settlement in Virginia in 2016, for a 36-year-old hotel housekeeper who suffered second and third degree burns to her face, neck, upper body, arms and hands when the natural gas dryer she was using exploded. Our team also secured a $1,300,000 settlement for a 17-year-old who lost the index and middle fingers of his dominant hand in a jointer machine, a file resolved on inadequate training and supervision over a contributory negligence and assumption of risk defense, and which included more than $888,000 for future prosthetics against under $13,000 in medical bills already incurred. That ratio is the whole point of these cases. What has been billed so far is almost never what the injury will cost.

If a product has caused a serious injury in your household, we would like to hear what happened.

Meet Your Personal Injury Attorneys

Jay Tronfeld

 

Elizabeth West

 

David Durrett

 

John Newby

 

Jen Mattingley

 

Joseph Robertson

 

Grayson Smith

Contact a Richmond Product Liability Attorney

Product cases are among the most document-intensive claims in injury law. They require the item itself, an engineer who can explain what went wrong, industry standards, and often internal records showing what a company knew and when it knew it. None of that assembles itself, and Virginia’s refusal to apply strict liability means the work has to be done correctly from the beginning rather than repaired later.

Tronfeld West & Durrett has offices in Richmond, North Chesterfield, Petersburg, and Mechanicsville, and we have been big enough to handle any case and small enough to have a personal feel for more than 50 years. You can review the outcomes we publish, read our answers to common Virginia product liability questions, and then contact Tronfeld West & Durrett for a free consultation. There is no fee unless we win your case.

FAQs About Richmond Product Liability Claims

Is Virginia a strict liability state for defective products?

No, and this sets Virginia apart from most of the country. Virginia never adopted strict liability in tort for product defects, so it is not enough to show that a product was defective and that it caused harm. The claim has to proceed on negligence, meaning the manufacturer or seller failed to exercise reasonable care, or on the implied warranty in Va. Code § 8.2-314, meaning the goods did not meet the standard the law reads into a sale. Most well-built cases plead both, since the two theories require different proof and a claim that struggles on one may succeed on the other.

What should I keep after a product injury?

The product itself, above everything else. Do not return it to the manufacturer or retailer, do not have it repaired, and do not throw it away, because an engineer needs to examine the actual unit that failed rather than a comparable one. Keep the packaging, the manual, the receipt or proof of purchase, and every warning label. Photograph the scene and the product before anything is moved, save all correspondence with the seller or manufacturer, and write down exactly how you were using it. Product cases are lost far more often on missing evidence than on unfavorable law.

Can I sue the store that sold the product, not just the manufacturer?

Sometimes. Retailers and distributors can face liability under breach of warranty, because the implied warranty of merchantability attaches to merchants who sell goods. Negligence claims against a retailer are harder, since a store that simply sold a sealed product in the condition it received it often has no reason to know of a defect. Naming the seller still matters when the manufacturer is out of business, located overseas, or otherwise difficult to reach, and it sometimes brings an additional insurance policy into a case that would otherwise have only one.

How long do I have to bring a product liability claim in Virginia?

Two years from the date of injury for the personal injury component, under Va. Code § 8.01-243. A breach of warranty claim follows the contract limitation in Va. Code § 8.01-246 instead, five years for a written contract and three for an unwritten one, and it generally begins running at delivery rather than at injury. Because the two clocks can run out at different times, an early review is the only reliable way to know which routes are still open to you.

Does a recall prove the product was defective?

It helps considerably, but it does not decide the case. A recall shows that the manufacturer or a regulator identified a hazard, and the notice itself, together with the documents behind it, can be extremely useful evidence of what the company knew and when. You still have to prove that the specific defect caused your specific injury, which is a separate question that generally requires an engineer and the product in hand. The reverse is equally true and more commonly relevant: the absence of a recall does not mean the product was safe, and many strong claims involve items that were never recalled at all.

Do I have a claim if I was hurt at work by defective equipment?

Possibly, and it is one of the more valuable situations to have reviewed. Workers compensation generally bars a claim against your employer, but it does not bar a claim against the company that designed, manufactured, or sold the equipment, or against a contractor that installed or maintained it badly. These are called third-party claims, and they can recover categories of damages workers compensation does not pay, including pain and suffering and full wage loss. The evidence rules are the same as in any other product case, which means the machine should not be repaired, altered, or returned to service before somebody has examined it.

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