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product liability cases
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are a little bit like medical
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malpractice cases
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and they both the products cases in the
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med mal cases are considered to be among
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the most difficult cases the personal
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injury lawyers handle
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and the reason is they’re very technical
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there’s a lot of science involved
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generally
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and it’s a big battle of the experts you
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have to find
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and retain and prepare well the very
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best experts sometimes
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from all over the country or even all
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over the world
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in order to make sure that at the time
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of trial
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you’re going to be able to establish
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that what the other expert is saying
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is not accurate is not the truth and
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the science supports your case an
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example of a product liability case
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which will require a lot of expert work
00:59
but with the right experts should be one
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is a metallurgy case right now i
01:05
represent
01:06
the wife and child of a man who was
01:09
killed
01:10
in an accident when he fell from
01:14
a tower after a bronze cast
01:18
piece of metal broke that case gives
01:21
rise to
01:22
a claim for product liability based on a
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manufacturing defect
01:28
so the key to that case is to get the
01:31
best metallurgist
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to analyze that that product
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and then to defeat the arguments that we
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know are coming
01:40
that always come from the manufacturer
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about how supposedly the product was
01:45
misused
01:46
or used too long or not used in the
01:49
right way
01:50
and those tend to be the case the issues
01:54
that come to the for in a product
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liability case
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i handled a series of medical product
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liability cases
02:02
that involved the unusual issue
02:06
involving health care workers who were
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suffering needle sticks
02:10
and contracting hiv disease which was
02:14
then back when we started working on
02:16
those cases
02:17
a death sentence or other transmissible
02:21
diseases
02:22
and it turned out that in a healthcare
02:25
setting two million accidental needle
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sticks
02:29
a year were happening to nurses and
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phlebotomists and nursing assistants and
02:35
doctors
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and that at least 90 percent of them
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were avoidable part of the
02:43
the legal challenge in a product
02:46
liability case
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is to show how a manufacturer
02:51
should have either warned about the
02:54
dangers of its product
02:55
or better yet designed out the dangers
02:58
of the product design the product in a
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way
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where those dangers or risks were really
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minimized or even eliminated