Award-Winning Los Angeles, CA Product Liability Lawyers

Lithium-ion battery fires in e-bikes, scooters, and electronics

Pressure cooker and kitchen appliance failures

Power tool and lawn equipment defects

Children's products, toys, and infant equipment

Medical device defects

Failure to warn and inadequate labeling

Defective construction and industrial equipment

Tire defects and tread separation

A defective tire that delaminates at freeway speed can trigger a rollover with catastrophic consequences. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that tire-related crashes cause around 11,000 reported incidents and several hundred deaths each year nationally. We retrieve the tire (do not let a tow yard discard it), photograph the failure pattern, and review NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for matching complaints. Tread depth, age of the tire, and inflation history all become evidence in the case.

Lithium-ion battery fires (e-bikes, scooters, electronics)

Battery thermal runaway has surged with the e-bike and e-scooter boom in Los Angeles, and similar fires occur in phones, laptops, and power tools. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has investigated thousands of micromobility-related fires nationally in recent years, with hundreds of injuries and dozens of deaths attributed to lithium-ion failures. Our team's guide to exploding-battery lawsuits in e-bikes and scooters walks through the legal theories and evidence preservation steps these cases require.

Pressure cooker and kitchen appliance failures

Pressure cookers that release while still pressurized cause severe burns to the face, chest, and arms. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has overseen multiple recall campaigns covering millions of units in recent years. Save the cooker exactly as it was, including the lid, gasket, and pressure-release valve. Photograph burns at intervals during healing to document the recovery, and keep purchase records that tie the unit to a specific manufacturer and retailer.

Power tool and construction equipment defects

Circular saws without working blade guards, chainsaws with failed chain brakes, nail guns with missing safety triggers, and lawnmowers with defeated dead-man switches cause amputations and deep lacerations across Los Angeles County job sites and home garages. The CPSC's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System tracks over 80,000 ER visits a year for power-tool injuries nationally. Preserve the tool, photograph the failed safety mechanism, and keep all receipts and prior service records.

Children's products, toys, and infant equipment

Cribs that collapse, strollers with unstable wheels, choking hazards in poorly designed toys, and infant carriers that fail federal standards cause life-altering injuries to young children every year. The CPSC reports over 200,000 toy-related ER visits per year for children under 15. Photograph the product as found, preserve all original packaging and warning labels, locate the model and lot number, and check both CPSC.gov and the manufacturer's recall page for matching units.

Defective medical devices

Hip implants, surgical mesh, IVC filters, and CPAP machines have generated some of the largest California product liability dockets of the past decade. The FDA's MAUDE database receives hundreds of thousands of medical-device adverse-event reports each year. Secure the explanted hardware, gather complete medical records and operative reports, and preserve manufacturer correspondence. We do not handle treatment-error cases, only the device itself and the company that made it.

Pharmaceutical failure-to-warn claims

When a drug manufacturer fails to disclose known risks, injured patients can pursue claims for inadequate warnings under California strict-liability principles. The FDA has issued thousands of safety-related label changes over the past decade based on adverse-event data. Preserve original packaging, prescription records, and all patient inserts. We review FDA labeling history and prescribing information to identify when the manufacturer first knew, or should have known, about the risk you suffered.

Recalled product injuries

If you were hurt by a product that was later recalled, the recall itself is powerful evidence of a defect. The Consumer Product Safety Commission issues several hundred recall announcements per year across consumer goods. We pull the recall notice from CPSC.gov or NHTSA, line up the timeline against your injury date, and document why the recall did not reach you in time. Manufacturers can still be held responsible for injuries caused by recalled products, particularly when the recall response was slow or incomplete.

Toxic exposure and Proposition 65 cases

California's Proposition 65 requires warnings about exposures to listed chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive harm. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment has listed over 900 chemicals under the program. When a product fails to warn and a consumer suffers a toxic-exposure injury, we review chemical content, supply-chain testing, and labeling. These cases can run alongside a strict-liability product claim where the same exposure caused the same injury.

Defective workplace and industrial machinery

Job-site injuries don't always come from worker error. A lot of the worst ones we see in LA County come from equipment that should never have been in the field, forklifts without backup alarms, scaffolding with pin connections that fail under load, scissor lifts with defective guarding, conveyors missing the emergency stops they were supposed to ship with. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported over 1,000 construction fatalities nationally in 2022, and equipment failure accounted for a real piece of that. We work the case on two parallel tracks, coordinating with the workers' comp insurer for immediate medical and wage replacement, and pursuing a third-party product liability claim against the manufacturer for the damages workers' comp can't reach.

Personal protective equipment failures

Three failures we keep seeing. Hard hats that crack on a routine impact. Respirators that don't filter what the label says they should. Fall-protection harnesses where the webbing tears under load. Cal/OSHA logs cases like this every year. The first thing we do is move fast. Test the equipment. Pull the manufacturer's certification records. Lock down the failed item before it ends up in a dumpster on the job site, which is where most of this evidence disappears to.

Defective household electronics and appliances

Appliances cause more fires than people realize. Space heaters that catch curtains, dishwashers with faulty wiring, microwaves with arcing magnetrons, washing machines that fling drum components, all of it shows up in the U.S. Fire Administration's data, which tracks tens of thousands of residential fires every year tied to appliance malfunctions. The hardest part for clients is that the instinct after a fire is to clean up. Don't. Preserve the unit, even if it's fire-damaged. Save your photos of the scene. Get a copy of the LAFD or local fire department incident report and hold onto it. Those are the pieces a case actually needs.

Defective furniture and home goods

Furniture tip-overs are one of those hidden hazards in the house that almost nobody thinks about until it happens. Dressers, bookshelves, televisions on top of stands, all of them have killed and injured children at numbers that should be much more public. The CPSC has reported hundreds of furniture-tip-over fatalities to children in recent decades, with thousands more injured. The federal STURDY Act now requires anti-tip standards for clothing storage units, which was a long time coming. If this happened in your home, the most important thing is to leave the furniture as-is. Don't repair it, don't replace it. Photograph the assembly. Keep the original instructions, the box if you still have it, and any anti-tip hardware that was, or wasn't, included.

Recreational and sporting product defects

Recreational injuries are often worse than people expect because the product was supposed to protect them. Bicycle frames that fracture, ATV roll bars that buckle, helmets that shatter on a normal impact, pool drains that trap swimmers, all of it shows up in the CPSC's NEISS data, which catalogs hundreds of thousands of recreational ER visits a year. If this happened to you or someone you know, the early steps matter a lot. Preserve the equipment in the same condition it was in after the incident. Photograph the failure mode itself, the part that broke. And get the conditions on record while you remember them, speed, terrain, weather, what you were doing right before.