Products Liability
The product was defective. You do not have to prove they were careless.
Missouri strict liability asks about the product, not the manufacturer’s conduct.
Haake Law Group represents people injured by defective and unreasonably dangerous products across Missouri — machinery and power tools, vehicles and component parts, appliances, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. These are among the most document-heavy cases in civil litigation, and they are decided by design records, testing files, and complaint histories that exist inside the manufacturer long before anyone gets hurt.
The standard
Strict liability is a genuinely different question.
In an ordinary negligence case you prove someone acted unreasonably. In a Missouri products case you often do not have to. Under RSMo § 537.760, a products liability claim asks whether the defendant transferred a product in the course of business, whether it was used in a manner reasonably anticipated, and whether either the product was “in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous when put to a reasonably anticipated use,” or it was “unreasonably dangerous when put to a reasonably anticipated use without knowledge of its characteristics” and was sold without an adequate warning.
Read what is missing from that list: any requirement that the manufacturer behaved badly. The question is the condition of the product as it was sold. That is why these cases are winnable against companies that did nothing obviously wrong — and why the defense fights so hard on “reasonably anticipated use.”
Manufacturing defect
The design was sound but this unit was not built to it — a bad weld, a contaminated batch, a missing fastener. Often the easiest defect to prove and the hardest to find, because the evidence is the product itself.
Design defect
Every unit is dangerous because the design is. These turn on whether a safer alternative design was feasible and available — which is proved out of the manufacturer’s own engineering and testing records.
Failure to warn
The product is dangerous in a way a user would not expect, and the warning was missing, buried, or inadequate. What the company knew, and when, is the whole case.
The evidence
The case is inside the company, and it exists already.
The product itself is the single most important piece of evidence, and it is routinely lost. It gets repaired, scrapped by an insurer, returned to the manufacturer for “analysis,” or thrown away by a well-meaning employer. Once it is gone the case is usually gone with it. Keep it, do not let anyone test or disassemble it without your lawyer present, and photograph it where it sits.
Design and testing records. Design history files, engineering change orders, failure modes and effects analyses, validation and durability testing, and the internal debates about safety features that were considered and rejected. Companies document these because regulators and their own quality systems require it.
Prior complaints and claims. Warranty claims, customer complaints, field service reports, and earlier lawsuits involving the same failure. A pattern converts a one-off accident into notice.
Recalls and regulatory files. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports, NHTSA investigations and recalls, and FDA adverse event reporting for devices and drugs. Much of it is public and can be checked before anyone is retained.
The alternative design. Frequently the strongest proof is that the manufacturer already sold a safer version — in another model, another market, or a later model year.
Do not give the product back.
The manufacturer’s adjuster will offer to collect it for testing. That request is not neutral.
Keep the product, the packaging, the manual, and the receipt. Tell us what happened and we will tell you what to preserve and whether the claim is worth pursuing at all — before anyone asks you to hand over the only physical evidence you have.
What we handle
Injuries caused by products that should not have shipped.
Machinery & Power Tools
Missing or defeated guards, unexpected start-up, inadequate lockout design, and saws, presses and industrial equipment that injure the operator doing exactly what the job required.
Vehicles & Component Parts
Defective airbags, seat backs, restraints, tyres, brakes, fuel systems and roof structures — including crashworthiness claims where the defect did not cause the crash but caused the injury.
Medical Devices
Implants, surgical hardware and monitoring equipment. Federal preemption is a real threshold question here, and the answer turns on how the device was approved.
Pharmaceuticals
Inadequate warnings and undisclosed risks. Whether the drug was brand-name or generic can decide whether a claim exists at all.
Household & Consumer Goods
Appliances, heaters and batteries that ignite, furniture that tips, and products that fail in ordinary domestic use.
Children’s Products
Car seats, cribs, toys and nursery equipment, where the applicable federal safety standard is often the starting point rather than the finish line.
Fires & Explosions
Lithium-ion batteries, gas appliances and electrical components. Origin-and-cause investigation has to happen before the scene is cleared.
Workplace Injuries by Machine
Where a third-party manufacturer — not your employer — built the machine, a products claim sits alongside workers’ compensation and reaches damages comp does not.
Wrongful Death
Fatal product failures, where Missouri limits who may bring the claim and imposes a shorter deadline than an injury case.
The process
What happens after you call.
Secure the product
Before anything else. The product, its packaging, the manual, the receipt, and any parts that came off it — preserved, photographed, and not surrendered to anyone for testing without an agreed protocol and our expert present.
Check what is already public
Recalls, CPSC reports, NHTSA investigations, FDA adverse events, and prior lawsuits over the same failure. This is free, it is fast, and it frequently tells us within days whether there is a case.
Identify every entity in the chain
Manufacturer, component maker, assembler, importer, distributor and retailer. Missouri lets an innocent seller out of the case, but only once a solvent manufacturer is properly before the court — so who gets named, and when, matters.
Engineering analysis
The right expert — mechanical, electrical, biomechanical, metallurgical, or human factors — examines the product and the alternative design. Products cases are proved by engineers; the lawyer’s job is to ask them the right questions.
Discovery into the design file
Design history, testing, change orders, complaint databases and internal safety correspondence. This is where the case is genuinely won, and where manufacturers resist hardest.
Demand, or try it
Manufacturers defend these cases seriously because a verdict sets a precedent across every unit they have sold. They settle when the design file plainly supports a trial.
Meet Derek Haake
He has been the company that designed and shipped the product.
The pairing that matters in a products case is not drafting and litigating — it is building and proving. Derek ran product development before he practised law, and he knows what documentation exists inside a manufacturer because he generated it.
As VP of Development at OptiCon Systems he assisted in the due diligence and negotiations for the acquisition of intellectual property from a business unit of Corning Cable Systems, and road-mapped the next version of the product. The technology his team worked on could locate a fiber break to within about five feet, against an industry standard nearer a third of the span — the difference between a specification that works in the field and one that does not. Specifications, tolerances, validation testing and change control are not abstractions to him.
He was Vice President of Development at Campus Shift, building the product, its public API and its mobile applications, and negotiating the company’s technical vendor agreements. Earlier, at ALLTEL Communications, he worked with directors on disaster control policy and drafted publicly filed tariffs before the utility commissions of four states — regulated-industry documentation, from the inside.
On the law side, he prosecuted and defended civil claims as a partner at Howard Haake from 2014 to 2022. Knowing how a manufacturer’s defense is actually built is what makes the discovery plan sharp rather than hopeful.
Common questions
Missouri products liability, answered.
Do I have to prove the manufacturer was careless?
Usually not. That is the central difference between a products case and an ordinary negligence case. Under RSMo § 537.760 a strict liability claim asks whether the defendant transferred the product in the course of business, whether it was used in a manner reasonably anticipated, and whether it was “in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous” when sold — or unreasonably dangerous without an adequate warning. Nothing in that requires proof that anyone at the company was negligent.
That matters practically. A manufacturer can have a good quality system, a competent engineering team and a clean regulatory record, and still be liable because this product left the factory defective.
Negligence is still often pleaded alongside strict liability, because it reaches conduct strict liability does not — a company that knew about a failure pattern and shipped anyway. Warranty claims under Missouri’s UCC may also apply: express warranty, the implied warranty of merchantability, and fitness for a particular purpose. Which theories fit depends on the facts, and they are not mutually exclusive.
What does “reasonably anticipated use” mean, and can they blame me for misusing it?
They will try, and it is the most contested element in most products cases. But the standard is not “used exactly as the manual instructed.” It is use the manufacturer could reasonably anticipate — which includes foreseeable misuse.
Manufacturers are expected to design for how products are actually used in the real world: the guard that operators routinely remove because the machine cannot be cleaned with it on, the ladder used on uneven ground, the tool used by someone who never read the manual. Foreseeable misuse is a design problem, not automatically a defence.
Even where your own conduct contributed, Missouri applies pure comparative fault. Under RSMo § 537.765 your fault “shall diminish proportionately the amount awarded as compensatory damages but shall not bar recovery.” Being partly at fault reduces the award; it does not end the claim.
The product was old. Is it too late?
Not necessarily, and Missouri is more favourable here than many states. Most personal injury claims must be filed within five years under RSMo § 516.120; a wrongful death claim runs three years under RSMo § 537.100.
The more important point is what Missouri does not have. Many states impose a statute of repose that extinguishes a products claim a fixed number of years after the product was sold, regardless of when the injury happened. Missouri has no general products statute of repose — the ten-year period in RSMo § 516.097 applies to improvements to real property, not to products at large. A twenty-year-old machine that injures someone today can still support a claim.
Age is still an evidentiary problem rather than a legal one: maintenance history, modifications made after sale, and wear all become live issues. But do not assume a product is too old to matter.
I bought it from a retailer, not the manufacturer. Who do I sue?
Everyone in the chain of distribution can be named — manufacturer, component maker, assembler, importer, distributor and retailer — and naming broadly at the outset is usually correct, because who actually caused the defect is not knowable before discovery.
Missouri then provides an exit for the genuinely innocent seller. Under RSMo § 537.762, a defendant whose liability rests solely on its status in the stream of commerce may be dismissed — but only where another defendant, including the manufacturer, is “properly before the court and from whom total recovery may be had.” The motion must be filed with the responsive pleading absent good cause, supported by an affidavit, with sixty days for discovery on it, and any dismissal is interlocutory and can be set aside for good cause.
Those conditions do real work. If the manufacturer is foreign, defunct, or judgment-proof, the retailer does not get out — because total recovery cannot be had from anyone else. This is exactly why the identity and solvency of every entity in the chain gets investigated early.
What if the danger was unknowable when the product was sold?
That is the state-of-the-art defence, and it is narrower than manufacturers like to suggest. Under RSMo § 537.764, “state of the art” means the dangerous nature of the product “was not known and could not reasonably be discovered at the time the product was placed into the stream of commerce.”
Three limits matter. It is an affirmative defence, so the manufacturer pleads it and carries the burden. It bars only strict liability claims based on failure to warn — not design defect, not manufacturing defect. And the statute expressly preserves negligence claims, so a company that should have discovered the danger through reasonable testing is not protected.
In practice the defence collapses whenever the design file shows the risk was raised internally, which is one more reason discovery into engineering records decides these cases.
Can I sue over a medical device or a prescription drug?
Sometimes, and the threshold question is federal preemption rather than Missouri law. The answer turns on the approval pathway, which is a fact you can look up.
For medical devices, Riegel v. Medtronic, 552 U.S. 312 (2008), held that the Medical Device Amendments preempt many state-law claims against devices that went through the FDA’s rigorous premarket approval process. Devices cleared through the far lighter 510(k) substantial-equivalence route are generally not protected in the same way — and most devices reach the market that way.
For drugs, Wyeth v. Levine, 555 U.S. 555 (2009), held that failure-to-warn claims against brand-name manufacturers are generally not preempted, because the manufacturer can strengthen its own label. But PLIVA v. Mensing, 564 U.S. 604 (2011), held such claims against generic manufacturers generally are preempted, since generics must match the brand label exactly. Whether the pharmacy dispensed brand or generic can therefore decide whether a claim exists.
This is unfair and widely criticised, and it is nonetheless the law. It is also why the first thing to establish is exactly which product, by which manufacturer, under which approval.
There was a recall. Does that win my case?
It helps considerably, and it does not decide the case. A recall shows the manufacturer identified a problem, and it tends to establish notice and the feasibility of a fix. It is not an admission that this product injured you.
Causation still has to be proved: that the recalled condition was present in your unit and caused your injury rather than something else. Manufacturers routinely argue that the recall addressed a different failure mode, or that the specific unit was outside the affected range.
The reverse is more important and less understood: the absence of a recall means very little. Most defective products are never recalled. Recalls depend on regulatory attention, reporting, and a company’s own decision-making, and plenty of dangerous products stay on the market. Do not let a manufacturer tell you there is no case because there was no recall.
Check the public record early — the Consumer Product Safety Commission and, for vehicles, NHTSA both publish searchable databases.
I was hurt by a machine at work. Does workers’ compensation stop me?
It stops you from suing your employer. It does not stop you from suing the company that made the machine, and that distinction is worth real money.
Workers’ compensation is generally the exclusive remedy against an employer, it applies regardless of fault, and it does not compensate pain and suffering. A products claim against the third-party manufacturer reaches the full range of damages. We do not handle workers’ compensation claims and will refer you to someone who does, but the products claim beside it is squarely our work.
Two practical points. The comp carrier will usually assert a lien against any third-party recovery for what it paid, and negotiating that lien down materially changes what you keep. And the machine is likely still on the shop floor and still in service — it needs to be preserved or at minimum inspected and documented before it is repaired, modified, or replaced.
What is my case worth?
It depends on the injury, and nobody can answer honestly before seeing the medical records. What is different about products cases is that available insurance is rarely the ceiling — manufacturers carry substantial product liability coverage, so the value tends to be set by the damages and the strength of the defect proof rather than by a policy limit.
Missouri’s medical-expense statute applies as in any injury case: under RSMo § 490.715 the recoverable value of medical care is framed around “actual cost” — amounts paid plus any remaining obligation after contractual discounts — rather than billed charges.
Punitive damages come up more often here than in most injury work, because the fact pattern that supports them — a company that knew about a failure and kept shipping — is exactly what the design file sometimes reveals. The standard is demanding: RSMo § 510.261 requires clear and convincing evidence of deliberate or flagrant disregard for the safety of others, bars pleading them in an initial filing, and requires a motion at least 120 days before the final pretrial conference.
What does it cost, and are these cases expensive to run?
Handled on contingency — a percentage of the recovery, no fee if there is no recovery, and a free initial consultation. Missouri Rule 4-1.5(c) requires the agreement to be in a signed writing stating how the fee is determined and which expenses are deducted, and whether they come out before or after the fee is calculated. That last detail changes what you actually receive and is worth reading in any firm’s agreement.
Being straight about the economics: products cases are expensive to run. Engineering experts, product testing, exemplar purchases, document review and depositions of corporate engineers add up quickly, and the expense is advanced and repaid from any recovery. That cost is why a modest injury from a clearly defective product sometimes still is not worth bringing, and we will tell you that at the consultation rather than after.
It is also why the early free steps matter so much — checking recall databases, preserving the product, identifying the manufacturer. Those cost nothing and often answer whether the case is real.
What should I do right now?
Keep the product. Do not return it, do not let it be repaired, and do not surrender it to the manufacturer, a retailer, or an insurer for testing. If someone has already asked, say you are getting advice first.
Keep the packaging, manual, receipt, model and serial numbers, and any broken parts. Photograph everything, including the scene, before anything is cleaned up or the machine is put back in service. Get medical treatment and keep following it.
Write down what happened while it is fresh — what you were doing, what the product did, what you heard or smelled, who saw it. Identify witnesses. If an employer, insurer or the manufacturer has already investigated, note who came and what they took.
Then call. Products cases are won on physical evidence and internal documents, and both start disappearing immediately.
Where do you handle these cases?
Throughout Missouri. Principal office at 401 Pine Street, Suite 950, St. Louis, MO 63102, with offices in Wildwood and St. Louis by appointment, and most work handled by phone, video and secure document exchange.
Products cases frequently involve out-of-state or foreign manufacturers, which raises personal jurisdiction and venue questions and often means removal to federal court. Where a case is filed can matter to its value, and it is decided deliberately.
For other injury claims see Personal Injury; for collisions, Car Accidents and Tractor Trailer Accidents.
Ready to start?
Keep the product. Then call.
Twenty minutes, no commitment, no fee unless we recover. We will tell you what to preserve today, whether the defect is one the public record already knows about, and whether the claim is worth pursuing at all.
Schedule a Free Consultation(314) 732-1547
Email derek@haakelawgroup.com · Offices in Wildwood, MO & St. Louis, MO (by appointment)
This page is general information, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and no result is promised or implied. Products liability outcomes depend heavily on the particular product, its approval pathway, and the facts of the injury. The scope of any engagement is set out in a written agreement. Consult a licensed attorney about your situation.