If you experienced a crash as a result of a defective motorcycle chart, you are about to dive into the world of product liability. This is a civil suit you can use to get compensation from a variety of people who were responsible for an unsafe part. You may need a Denver personal injury lawyer to help you navigate the world of product liability because there are several different precedents and state laws you can sue under.
An easier method for your Denver personal injury attorney to sue is to show the court the company violated an express warranty. If the manufacturer or seller guaranteed that something would not fail and it did, you might be able to receive compensation. Commonly express warranties are spelled out on product packaging, on instructions or in advertising materials. If you bought an accessory for your motorcycle that says it was rated for that bike and engine power and it ends up blowing up, that might be a violation of an express warranty. Of course because of the volume of lawsuits, many warranties are expressly vague, and don’t really guarantee anything.
That brings us to implied warranties, or a level of quality a reasonable person would expect. State laws usually apply these warranties to protect consumers from ridiculously shoddy or dangerous motorcycle products by having a minimal bar of quality. You should not expect parts to dramatically fail in normal use, and if the manufacturer claimed that the part could be used in a specific application and it does not, this is a violation of an implied warranty of fitness for a particular motorbike purpose.
Some states have strict liability laws when it comes to parts that could easily end your life if they fail. These make the manufacturer liable for any failures regardless of fault or negligence as an incentive for them to make products as safe as possible. Usually you need to show the manufacturer knew that the product was unsafe, could cause motorcycle accidents, or at least violated quality control standards. Under strict liability, you only need to show that the part failed and that it caused your accident. The state of mind of the motorcycle parts company is irrelevant.
More commonly, your Denver personal injury lawyer will have to prove that the company was negligent in the design or distribution of the part. These negligence claims are similar to the civil suits that make up most accident cases. This can be difficult to prove because often the information proving that a company acted recklessly is in their hands and they may try to conceal it. The “smoking gun” or memo explaining a known defect in a product can be hard to find and easy for the company to “lose.” This deliberate concealment is a larger crime, possibly fraud or a criminal violation, but again hard to prove. Unfortunately the size of the company often matters in these cases. It will be a lot harder fighting a pharmaceutical company in court trying to prove their chemists did not do proper product testing than proving your local dealership did not properly inspect their products.
