Gears on a blueprint

Juvenile Products

Our Juvenile Product Liability Team understands the nuanced challenges of defending companies that manufacture products used by children and their parents.

Employing traditional, blunt force litigation tactics often is not the most successful approach, as coming across as too confrontational where a child is involved can easily backfire.

Successful defense requires convincing a jury that the product was not defective while proving that the child’s injuries were caused by something or someone else. Oftentimes, this involves directly or indirectly confronting a jury’s understandable natural desire to award sizeable damages based on sympathy for both the parents and the child by bringing out the whole picture, including all the facts and circumstances that led to the child’s injuries. This is not an easy task, but it can be done effectively with the right approach.

Our attorneys have litigated over 200 of these cases in more than 40 states. We have repeatedly tried them successfully to verdict or have convinced plaintiffs to accept settlements for reasonable amounts (often because they recognize our success in taking these cases to trial). Our strategy puts our clients in control of whether to resolve the case confidentially through settlement, or to take the case to trial in order to take a stand against would-be future claimants.

Our years of experience successfully litigating these cases has also allowed us to develop highly effective strategies to hold down the costs associated with resolving them.

Outside the courtroom, we counsel our clients on a variety of issues which arise during the design, manufacturing and distribution phases for their juvenile products. Our counseling work includes:

  • Compliance with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act’s safety regulations for children’s products
  • Reporting incident data and negotiating corrective action plans with the Consumer Product Safety Commission
  • The appearance, wording and location of product warning labels and instruction manuals
  • Conducting juvenile product recalls in order to minimize their impact on pending and future litigation
  • Making educational presentations to engineering, marketing and management personnel on legal issues facing the juvenile products industry
  • Strategizing with designers and manufacturers when they change the design of existing juvenile products to minimize future product liability exposure

Awards & Honors

  • U.S. News – Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” – National Tier 1
    • Mass Tort Litigation/Class Actions Law (2013-2022)
  • U.S. News – Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” – Metropolitan Tier 1
    • Appellate Practice, Chicago (2014-2022)
    • Mass Tort Litigation / Class Actions – Defendants, Chicago (2012-2022)
    • Mass Tort Litigation / Class Actions – Defendants, New York (2013-2022)
    • Personal Injury Litigation - Defendants, San Francisco (2016-2021)

Perspectives on Juvenile Products