Fort Lauderdale Product Liability Lawyer
Something you bought failed, caught fire or came apart in your hands, and left an injury nobody warned you was possible. We can take it from here. Call 954-522-5800 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Broward County since 1993.
Product Liability claims in Fort Lauderdale
The manufacturer will say the product was misused, and will want the item itself sent away for testing on its terms. Meanwhile you are covering the treatment, missing work, and living in a house that may hold more of the same product. Keeping that evidence and proving the fault is our job, and it starts the day you call.
Product cases in Broward run from consumer goods and vehicle components to marine equipment and machinery, and they share one practical rule that has nothing to do with the law: the item itself is the evidence. A manufacturer defends by arguing misuse, alteration or wear, and the only reliable answer is examination of the actual product by an engineer. Insurers and repairers routinely dispose of it, sometimes within days, and the case ends there. Florida also imposes an outer time limit on products claims measured from delivery, separately from the ordinary injury deadline.
A Broward product claim is proved by examining the item that failed, which is why keeping it matters more than anything said in the first phone call. Repairers and insurers dispose of the evidence within days. Two deadlines run: two years from discovery, and an outer limit of 12 years from delivery under the repose statute.
What to do after a product liability in Fort Lauderdale
- Keep the product, exactly as it is. Do not repair it, clean it, return it or send it back for a refund. The item is the case. An engineer examining the actual product is what answers a manufacturer arguing misuse or wear, and no photograph substitutes for it. Where a fire or a crash left only part of it, keep the part. Where a shop or an insurer has it, tell them in writing not to dispose of it.
- Keep the box, the manual, the receipt and the charger. The packaging carries the model, the batch and frequently the importer, which is how a reachable defendant gets identified when the maker is overseas. The manual is what the warning claim is measured against. The receipt fixes the date of sale, which matters because a separate outer deadline runs from delivery rather than from injury. People throw all four away and keep the product, which is exactly backward.
- Photograph everything before anyone moves it. The product, the scene, the damage, the labels and any warning on the item itself, from several angles and before it is cleaned up. Where there was a fire, photograph what is left in place. Investigators and cleanup crews arrive quickly and are not preserving anything for you.
- Do not let it be inspected without you. A manufacturer or insurer will ask to take the item away and look at it. Testing can be destructive, and an examination conducted without your own expert present is one you cannot repeat. Inspections in these cases are arranged jointly, on agreed terms, with both sides watching. Saying no to an informal request costs nothing.
- Get treated, and for a medicine get the full pharmacy record. The medical record links the injury to the product and is what a claim is built on. Where a prescription is involved, the complete dispensing history from every pharmacy is the document that establishes what was taken, when and for how long. Nobody remembers it accurately and it we can get in a week.
Where these happen in Fort Lauderdale
The products that injure people in Broward follow how people here live: on the water, in the garage, and in a high-rise where somebody else maintains the equipment.
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Marine and boating equipment
Broward has one of the densest concentrations of recreational boating in the country, and marine equipment fails in ways that put people in the water.
- Engine, fuel system and steering component failures on the water
- Carbon monoxide from generators and exhaust routed into enclosed spaces
- Lifting, hoist and davit equipment at marinas and private docks
- Repairs and refits performed by a yard, which is a separate defendant from the maker
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Vehicle components, and the shop that has them
Tires, airbags, seat belts, brakes and steering parts are the ordinary run of these cases, and the part is almost always somewhere else by the time anyone calls.
- The failed component itself, held by a repair shop, a tow yard or an insurer
- Whether the vehicle was salvaged and sold before the part was examined
- Repair and service history, which shows what was replaced and by whom
- A written instruction not to dispose of it, sent the same day it is located
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Household goods and rented equipment
Appliances, tools, ladders, furniture and equipment rented for a weekend job, most of it bought online and none of it kept once it has hurt somebody.
- Ladders, chairs and mobility devices that collapsed under normal use
- Rented tools and equipment, where the rental company also maintained it
- The box, the manual and the receipt, which identify the batch and the seller
- Products still in use after a recall, in rentals, resale and short-term lets
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Where the evidence goes
The reason so many of these claims fail has nothing to do with the law. It is that the item was thrown out by somebody with no reason to keep it.
- Insurers taking possession of a damaged item as part of a payout
- Repair shops discarding a failed part once the customer has been paid
- Fire scenes cleared, sometimes within days of the fire being out
- Manufacturers offering a replacement in exchange for the original
What causes them
- A design that was unreasonably dangerous as drawn, where a safer alternative was available
- Manufacturing faults affecting one batch or one run rather than the whole product line
- Warnings and instructions that were missing, buried in small print or placed where nobody reads them
- Component parts that failed inside an assembly somebody else built and sold
- Lithium cells, packs and chargers that fail by igniting rather than by stopping
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Burns and inhalation injury
Fires from batteries, heaters, generators and electrical faults produce the most severe injuries in this practice. Burn treatment runs for years through grafting and revision, the scarring is a claim separate from the medical cost, and smoke and chemical inhalation causes lung damage that shows up after the burns have been treated.
Amputation and crush injury
Machinery, power tools and equipment with guards that were absent, defeated or badly designed. Limb loss brings prosthetics replaced on a schedule rather than bought once, revision surgery, and a home and a vehicle that have to be changed to work.
Poisoning and internal organ injury
Carbon monoxide from fuel-burning equipment used indoors, and organ damage from medicines and chemical exposure. Both are frequently attributed to something else first, which is why the connection is often made late and why the record of when it was made matters.
What Florida law requires you to prove
Three ways a product can be defective, and everyone who sold it
A claim runs on a defect in design, a defect in manufacture, or a failure to warn, and they are proved differently. Florida applies strict liability along the distribution chain rather than only to the maker, so a manufacturer, a component supplier, an importer, a distributor and in defined circumstances a retailer can each be liable. That matters most where the maker is overseas and effectively out of reach, because the importer who brought the product into the country is here.
A design is judged by what was known when it was built
Under Fla. Stat. § 768.1257, a design defect case is measured against the state of scientific and technical knowledge at the time of manufacture rather than at the time of the injury. It cuts both ways. A manufacturer is not answerable for failing to use a safety feature that did not exist yet, and it is squarely answerable for not using one that did.
Prescription medicines are warned to the doctor, not to you
Florida applies the learned intermediary doctrine, so a drug manufacturer discharges its duty to warn by adequately warning the prescribing physician. The question in a pharmaceutical case is therefore not what you were told. It is what the company knew, when it knew it, and what it told the medical profession, which is why these claims are built from adverse event reporting, internal safety review and regulatory correspondence rather than from a patient’s own file.
Two deadlines run, and the second one surprises people
Most claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 carry a two-year deadline under Fla. Stat. § 95.11, and in a product case it generally runs from when the injury and its cause were or should have been discovered. Separately, Fla. Stat. § 95.031 bars most products claims where the harm came from use of a product more than 12 years after it was delivered to its first purchaser, whatever the injury date. That outer limit stretches to 20 years for aircraft, vessels over 100 gross tons, railroad equipment and improvements to real property, and to whatever period a manufacturer warranted where it warranted more than ten years of useful life. Fault is shared under Fla. Stat. § 768.81.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide product liability page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Broward County
A defect case is an engineering case with a legal wrapper. What decides it is whether an expert can examine the actual item and say what failed and why.
- The product itself, or whatever survives of it, unaltered and uncleaned
- The packaging, the manual, the labels and the receipt, which give model, batch, seller and date of delivery
- Photographs taken before anything was moved, including the scene and any warning printed on the item
- A written preservation demand to whoever holds it: the shop, the insurer, the landlord or the fire department
- An inspection protocol agreed in advance, with both sides’ experts present
- The manufacturer’s own testing, complaint and warranty records for the same failure
- Recall notices, service bulletins and regulatory correspondence about the product line
- The date of first delivery, which decides whether the outer repose deadline has already run
Where somebody else destroyed the item after being told it mattered, Florida recognizes consequences for that, which can include an instruction to the jury about what the missing evidence would have shown. It is a far weaker position than simply having the thing.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Fort Lauderdale is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled product liability claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
A product manufacturer is not defending one claim. It is defending every claim that could follow from the same finding, which is why these files are contested harder than their value alone would explain.
- You used it wrong
- The standard answer, and it is not the test. Manufacturers are expected to anticipate foreseeable misuse and to design and warn against it, so the question is whether what somebody did was foreseeable rather than whether it matched the manual. Florida also divides the blame rather than barring a claim, so even a share of responsibility reduces a recovery instead of ending it.
- It was altered, serviced or simply worn out
- Raised in nearly every case involving equipment that had been in use. Whether a change was material, whether it caused the failure and who made it are questions for an engineer looking at the item. It is also the reason the product is preserved untouched, because the argument is unanswerable once somebody has taken it apart informally.
- The product met every applicable standard
- Compliance is evidence and it is not a defense on its own. Standards set a floor, they lag behind what is known, and meeting one says nothing about whether a safer design was available at the time of manufacture. What usually matters more is what the company’s own testing and complaint records showed about the same failure.
What a claim can include
Medical care, past and future
Everything already billed and what the treating physicians say is still ahead, including the revision surgery and the equipment replaced on a schedule that nobody mentions in month one.
Lost income and lost earning capacity
Wages missed, and separately what somebody can no longer earn. Where a hand or an eye is involved, the second figure is usually much larger than the first.
Pain, suffering and loss of the ability to enjoy life
The head of loss an early offer prices lowest, because it is the one with no invoice attached.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Lauderdale
A Broward product case is filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit at the Broward County Courthouse, and this office has worked in it since 1993. These claims usually name a maker, a component supplier, a distributor and a seller at once, and holding all of them in a single file is what stops each pointing at the others while the evidence deteriorates.
Richard Pravato has been Board Certified in Civil Trial law by The Florida Bar since 2004. The Bar lists 861 lawyers in the state holding it against a membership over 109,000. What it means in practice is that the other side knows the file can go in front of a jury, and files that can go to trial are priced differently from files that cannot.
The first conversation is free. We are paid out of the recovery or not at all, and if we do not think there is a claim worth bringing we will tell you that rather than take it.
Fort Lauderdale product liability questions
The shop threw away the part that failed. Is the case over?
Harder, and not always over. Where another party destroyed evidence after being on notice that it mattered, Florida recognizes consequences for that, which can include an instruction to the jury about what the missing item would have shown. It is a much weaker position than having it. If you still hold the product, or any of it, keep it exactly as it is and do not let anybody examine it on their own.
The manufacturer offered to replace it if I send the old one back.
Do not send it. That exchange, offered routinely and usually in good faith by somebody in customer service, removes the only piece of evidence the case depends on. A replacement is worth a few hundred dollars. The original is worth the claim. Decline it in writing and keep the correspondence, because the offer itself sometimes shows the company already knew about the failure.
How long do I have?
Two clocks run at once. The ordinary deadline for most claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 is two years, generally measured from when the injury and its cause were or should have been discovered. Separately, the repose statute bars most products claims where the harm came from a product delivered more than 12 years earlier, whatever the injury date, with a 20-year period for aircraft, vessels over 100 gross tons, railroad equipment and improvements to real property.
Do I have to prove the manufacturer was negligent?
Not for a strict liability claim. The question is whether the product was defective and whether the defect caused your injury, not whether the company was careless in producing it. Negligence can also be pleaded alongside, but it is not the only route.
The product was recalled after I was hurt. Does that help?
It is usually helpful, though a recall is not automatically an admission and its use at trial has limits. What tends to matter more is what the manufacturer knew and when, which the recall investigation and the internal documents behind it often reveal.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 W Commercial Blvd, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309.