When pursuing a product liability lawsuit, evidence is everything. Cases can only be won if you can prove to a jury (or convince the defendant's attorneys you can prove) that the product was defective and directly lead to your injuries. Evidence is how you do that.
Compelling evidence is the bedrock of any successful personal injury case. Our firm has litigated literally hundreds of personal injury cases, but we've never seen a company simply admit they made a bad product that resulted in harm to a consumer. Moreover, manufacturers don't have to lift a finger to win their case because the law places the burden on you to make yours. That's why evidence is crucial to your efforts.
In order to win a product liability case, you must show that you were using the product—as the manufacturer intended—and that it harmed you when it should not have.
The exact evidence gathered will vary from case to case. Every once in a while there may be a lawsuit with clear video evidence showing exactly what when wrong while a product was in use, but more commonly, evidence will be a compilation of many different pieces. Things like:
- your injuries,
- witness testimony,
- the physical product that caused the injury/vehicle involved in the crash,
- forensic analysis of the vehicle to identify the defect,
- security camera footage,
- medical records,
- cell phone data, etc.
Do you notice what's missing from that list? It's the police report. In our firm's more than 3 decades of litigation cases, we've never once seen a police report that identified all but the most obvious defects.
The evidence could be anything and can come from anywhere because a lawsuit needs every single piece of information possible that can help defend your case. If you're thinking to yourself, "I don't have a clue how to do all that," that's why there are product liability attorneys. Not only do experienced attorneys know how to gather this information, craft it, and get it admitted into court, but they also have the resources to pay for the expenses associated with these investigations.
Of course, hiring an attorney can be expensive, so the way our firm operates, the client doesn't pay for the investigation unless we can make a case out of it and win. If we find that no outside party is to blame, we will simply withdraw, and you won't have to pay us a penny. If it turns out there is someone who is to blame, then we'll sue them, and you only pay us if we win.
