Manufacturers are responsible for designing and producing goods that are reasonably safe for ordinary use, whether that product is a car part, a medical device, a household appliance, or a bottle of medication. When a company cuts corners on that responsibility, the people who trusted the product are the ones who pay for it, often with catastrophic injuries that follow them for years. Frischhertz & Impastato represents New Orleans families and workers hurt by products that never should have reached the market in the form they did.
These cases tend to be more technical than a typical personal injury claim. Proving that a product itself, rather than user error, caused an injury usually requires digging into manufacturing records, recall histories, and internal safety testing, and it often means working with professionals who have technical or scientific training relevant to how the product was designed or built. Our New Orleans products liability lawyers have represented clients across a wide range of defective product cases and knows how to put that kind of technical picture together.
Louisiana does not leave the definition of a defective product to guesswork. The Louisiana Products Liability Act sets out the only theories under which a manufacturer can be held liable for a product's harm (La. R.S. 9:2800.52). A product is only considered unreasonably dangerous if it falls into one of four categories (La. R.S. 9:2800.54).
These are:
A construction or composition defect, meaning the product left the manufacturer different from how it was intended to be made.
A design defect, meaning the product was manufactured exactly as intended, but that intended design was itself unreasonably dangerous.
An inadequate warning, meaning the manufacturer failed to warn users of a danger it knew or should have known about.
A failure to conform to the manufacturer's own express warranty about the product.
Because a products liability claim often turns on how something was engineered or manufactured, we work to reconstruct that process from the inside out. That can mean reviewing a manufacturer's design and testing files, comparing a product against industry standards, tracking down prior complaints or recalls involving the same product line, and consulting professionals in fields such as human factors and ergonomics, mechanical or structural engineering, automotive design, or metallurgy to explain how and why a product failed. Our New Orleans products liability lawyers consider every angle.
Types of Defective Products
Defective product cases we handle span a wide range of goods, including:
Medications and supplements with undisclosed side effects or inadequate warning labels
Medical and industrial devices that fail during normal use
Household appliances such as heaters, stoves, wiring, and batteries that spark fires or cause burns
Vehicle components, including airbags, seatbelts, brakes, steering systems, tires, and fuel systems
Cosmetic and skincare products containing contaminated or harmful ingredients
Children's products and toys that pose choking, entanglement, or chemical exposure risks
Who May Be Responsible & How Long You Have to Act
A manufacturer is usually the primary target in these cases, but depending on how a product moved through the supply chain, a distributor or seller may also share responsibility for the harm it caused. Claims like these are also subject to a filing deadline: Louisiana's prescriptive period for injury claims arising on or after July 1, 2024 runs two years from the date of the injury (La. Civ. Code art. 3493.11), and waiting too long to investigate a product defect can mean losing access to the very evidence needed to prove the case.
A Firm That Takes On Manufacturers Directly
Companies rarely admit that their own product caused harm, and they have legal teams built to make that argument difficult to win. We have recovered more than $700 million for injured clients across the firm's history, including in cases where a manufacturer or its insurer initially denied any defect existed at all. Taking on a products liability case means being prepared to out-prepare a manufacturer's own engineers and lawyers, and that is the standard we hold every case to.
Defective product cases move faster than most people expect. Before evidence disappears or memories fade, involve a New Orleans products liability attorney: (504) 276-6962. Your initial consultation is free, and you owe us nothing unless we recover compensation for you.
A compilation of the Frischhertz & Impastato attorneys and staff at work and interacting with clients.
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