Some injuries are not caused by a careless person but by a dangerous product that never should have reached the person using it. When that happens, the company that made it, and often those that sold it, can be held to account.
Texas product liability law recognizes three kinds of defect. A manufacturing defect means the item came off the line different from its design and dangerous. A design defect means the design itself was unreasonably dangerous and a safer alternative was feasible. A marketing defect means the product lacked the warnings or instructions needed to use it safely. A claim can rest on strict liability, which focuses on the product rather than the maker's care, and on negligence.
These are document-and-expert cases. Proving a defect takes preserving the product exactly as it was, engineering analysis, the manufacturer's own design and testing records, and reports of similar failures. Preserving the physical product itself, unaltered, is often the single most important early step, because once it is repaired, discarded, or tampered with, the case can be lost.
Texas product liability actions are governed in large part by Chapter 82 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, and the two-year limitations period generally applies. Certain products are also subject to a statute of repose that can bar claims after a set number of years from sale, so the timeline should be checked early.
From The Night Docket
On cause and the paper trail:
One Word: Repose →
Repose: limitations asks when the clock started on you; repose asks when it ran out on the thing, and it does not care what you knew. Texas gives a product fifteen years from the day the defendant sold it, with a written-warranty exception, a latent-disease exception, and a carve-out for aircraft, where a federal statute of repose gives general aviation manufacturers eighteen years from delivery, restarts the clock on a replaced part, and lists its own four exceptions. What the two statutes say, why a dead claim against the maker turns the case toward the operator, the owner and the shop, and the dates a family has to find first.
The Body: The Quiet Gas →
Carbon monoxide has no color and no smell, and it takes oxygen’s seat in the blood and holds it about two hundred times harder. Why the symptoms look like the flu, why the fingertip monitor reads normal, the injury that shows up weeks later, what the storms taught Texas about generators, and what the law asks.
Crashworthiness →
When the car did not cause the crash but made the injury worse: the federal standards, the presumption, and why the car has to be saved.
Proximate Cause →
Tying the defect to the injury it caused.
Deblading →
Reading a product failure through the physical evidence and the records.
Spoliation →
Why preserving the product itself can decide the case.