A driver cranks a truck engine to test a brake line. Seconds later, it’s rolling over his own legs.
That’s not a hypothetical. It happened — and it’s the kind of case that sits at the center of Douglas Herman’s work as a Savannah, Georgia, attorney. Practicing with the Mike Hostilo Law Firm, Herman handles a wide range of personal injury matters. One focus stands out: product liability law, the area meant to keep dangerous or poorly made products off store shelves and out of people’s hands. This is the broader question behind Attorney Douglas Herman on Product Liability and Proximate Cause — where does responsibility for an injury actually begin?
Here’s the thing about Georgia law: it doesn’t treat everyone in the sales chain the same way.
Manufacturers carry strict liability. Full stop. Sellers and distributors? Different story — they’re only on the hook for negligence or a broken warranty, not strict liability. Design and manufacturing defects, though, fall squarely under that stricter standard. A US District Court case, Williamson v. Walmart Stores, Inc., tested the edges of that rule. A plaintiff was injured after holding a plastic gas container near an open flame. Liability claims hit multiple parties, and the court ultimately ruled that both the product’s designer and its manufacturer counted as “the manufacturer” for strict liability purposes. Worth remembering, if you’re trying to figure out who’s actually on the hook.
Georgia recognizes three main types of product liability claims.
Manufacturing defects cover items that came out wrong compared to the rest of the product line — something went sideways on the assembly floor. Design defects are different; even a perfectly built item can still be unreasonably dangerous if the underlying design was flawed from the start. And then there’s failure to warn — also called a marketing defect — where a product hits the market without the instructions or warnings it actually needed.
But knowing a product was flawed isn’t enough to win a case. You also need proximate cause.
Proximate cause is the legal thread tying the defect directly to the injury. Break that thread — say, with an intervening cause — and the whole claim can collapse. Weaver v. PACCAR, Inc. shows exactly how messy that can get. Picture it: a mechanic is underneath a truck-tractor, hunting for the source of a brake line air leak. He thinks he’s found it. To confirm, he cranks the engine, hoping to build enough air pressure to prove the theory.
Except the truck was still in gear. The brakes weren’t engaged.
The vehicle lurched forward and ran over his legs. His lawsuit pointed to a design flaw — no “neutral safety switch” to stop the truck from starting unless it was in neutral. Sounds reasonable on paper, right?
The court didn’t buy it. Driver negligence, the judges concluded, was the actual proximate cause of the injury — not the missing switch. Their reasoning leaned on a simple assumption: a trained truck operator should know better than to crank an engine with the vehicle in gear and the brakes off. That risk should’ve been obvious going in. As the court put it, “defendant-manufacturers may be expected to foresee negligence born of ignorance, but they are not expected to foresee negligence from distraction, inattentiveness, or absent-mindedness.”
That line does a lot of work. It draws a sharp boundary between defects a company should anticipate and mistakes a trained professional simply shouldn’t make.
Cases like this are exactly why Attorney Douglas Herman on Product Liability and Proximate Cause matters for anyone hurt by a product they trusted. Defect alone rarely wins a case. Causation has to hold up too — and as Weaver shows, that link can be more fragile than it looks.
