Product Liability: The Adequacy of Warning Labels

Should a failure-to-warn claim succeed if the claimant would not have read or heeded the warning label? Would it make a difference if a label had been presented so that the plaintiff would never have seen it in the first place? These issues are currently before the Illinois Supreme Court in Lawrence E. Elam v Lincoln Electric Co., et al. This case highlights the challenges manufacturers face in trying to effectively communicate adequate instructions and appropriate warnings for the safe use of their products. Although this is an American case, its principles have general applicability for all manufacturers seeking to reduce their product liability risks.

In the Elam case, the plaintiff was a pipefitter and welder for his employer for over 30 years. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and later filed a lawsuit against welding rod manufacturers in which he claimed, among other things, that the welding rods did not have labels warning him of the need to wear protective clothing when using the welding rods. The evidence in the trial court was that these warnings had been placed on the cartons containing the welding rods but that the welders seldom saw the cartons because the rods had been removed from the cartons by the time they were used by the welders. To complicate matters, the warnings instructed the user to wear protective clothing, and the claimant testified that neither he nor his colleagues ever wore the protective gear issued to them.

The jury returned a verdict of $1 million for Mr. Elam, and this verdict was confirmed on appeal to the Illinois lower appellate court. In that appeal, the defendants relied on a previous case that held that a failure-to-warn claim could not succeed when a plaintiff admitted he did not read the warnings. The lower appellate court was not persuaded by this argument. The precedent case involved a situation where the plaintiff had had an opportunity to read the warning label but did not take it; this fact prevented a plaintiff from complaining that the warning would have been insufficient had he in fact read it.

The lower appellate court felt that the current case was different. In this case Mr. Elam had never had the opportunity to read the labels because the "defendants packaged the relevant warnings in a way that virtually guaranteed plaintiff and others within the welding trade would not read them." The issue faced by the Illinois Supreme Court case is a difficult one of causation. Should the welding rod manufacturers be liable because they did not design the delivery of the warnings about their products so that a user would see them when all the evidence suggests that this particular user would not have read them or heeded their message in any event.

For manufacturers however, the lesson is simple, even before the Illinois Supreme Court finally decides the Elam case. Under established product liability principles in the United States a manufacturer of a product is expected to instruct adequately and to warn users effectively about the safe use of its product. In designing a product label that will reduce the risk of injury to users, manufacturers should carefully consider how a product is used, the state in which it arrives in the hands of the ultimate user, and the best means to ensure that a user understands how to use that product with due attention to the user's health and safety.