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Calif. Supreme Court Ruling Gives Manufacturers Added Protection From Lawsuits
The Recorder
April 04, 2008
Manufacturers got added protection from lawsuits Thursday when the California Supreme Court ruled they can't be held liable for not warning specialists about product dangers that should be well known within their professions.
The unanimous ruling allows manufacturers to assert the so-called sophisticated user doctrine, which says there is normally no duty to warn professionals about commonly known hazards. The doctrine provides an exception to manufacturers' general duty under state law to warn consumers about potential product perils.
"Just as a manufacturer need not warn ordinary consumers about generally known dangers," Justice Ming Chin wrote, "a manufacturer need not warn members of a trade or profession (sophisticated users) about dangers generally known to that trade or profession."
The ruling was eagerly awaited, with several manufacturer and business groups -- including the Product Liability Advisory Council Inc. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- filing amicus curiae briefs with the court.
The underlying suit was filed in 2002 by William Johnson, a certified heating, ventilation and air conditioning technician who came down with a potentially fatal lung disease while repairing an air conditioning system at a Torrance, Calif., bank. He sued the manufacturer, American Standard Inc. -- which is now called Trane Inc. -- for negligence and failure to warn, claiming he wasn't aware heating a pipe containing refrigerant would produce the toxic gas phosgene.
A trial court judge granted summary judgment for the manufacturer and Los Angeles' 2nd District Court of Appeal affirmed three years ago, holding that "a manufacturer cannot be liable to a sophisticated user of its product for failure to warn of a risk, if a sophisticated user should reasonably know of that risk."
The Supreme Court agreed, referring to several federal court cases and rulings from other states that have held the same. The court also didn't give much weight to Johnson's claim that neither he nor many of his co-workers remembered reading or hearing about the dangers of phosgene.
"Even if a user was truly unaware of a product's hazards, that fact is irrelevant if the danger was objectively obvious," Chin wrote.
In addition, Chin held that a sophisticated user defense would help ensure that most warnings would be heeded.
"Requiring manufacturers to warn their products' users in all instances," he wrote, "would 'invite mass consumer disregard and ultimate contempt for the warning process.'"
Johnson's attorney, Gregory Coolidge, a partner with Long Beach, Calif.'s Metzger Law Group, didn't return a telephone call seeking comment on Thursday. But Sharon Arkin, a partner with Pasadena's Arkin & Glovsky who shared oral arguments with Coolidge in January, called the ruling "very disappointing" and predicted "very significant implications."
Arkin, who represented the Consumer Attorneys of California as amicus, predicted that the sophisticated user defense would "come up in a lot of cases ... It creates a whole new hurdle for the plaintiffs, a whole new area of discovery, a whole new area for summary judgments."
Jeffrey Bleich, a partner in Munger, Tolles & Olson's San Francisco office who represented the manufacturer, called Thursday's ruling "a triumph of common sense."
"It's important," he said, "in the sense that it gives some clear guidance in California [by telling] manufacturers that they don't have to put a warning on every possible thing, no matter how obvious they believe the hazard is to users who are using that product."
Bleich, who is the current president of the State Bar of California, said manufacturers only need to "be judicious about what warnings to give and they need to be tailored to the audience and the nature of the hazard."
The ruling is Johnson v. American Standard Inc., 08 C.D.O.S. 3925.
