When the Judgment Is Not the End: Attacking and Defending Final Judgments Under Missouri Law
How opposing parties — and liability insurers in particular — seek relief from judgments that bind or affect them, and how the judgment holder keeps what was won For the plaintiff’s lawyer, entry of judgment feels like the finish line. For the…
Investigating the Products Case: Preservation, Spoliation, and Cost
Why more products cases are won or lost in the first weeks than in the courtroom A products case is proved with physical evidence, and physical evidence is perishable. The unit that failed can be repaired, scrapped, returned to a lessor, cleaned by an…
Product Recall Evidence in Civil Litigation
A Missouri-specific framework where the common law decides what the jury hears, and where the recall question has no square answer Few pieces of evidence are as coveted by a products plaintiff, or as feared by the defense, as a manufacturer’s recall. A…
The Learned Intermediary Doctrine in Missouri Products Cases
When the duty to warn runs to the prescriber, how the prescriber’s knowledge ends the case, and how federal preemption sits on top of it all In the ordinary products case the manufacturer’s duty to warn runs to the user. Prescription drugs and medical…
Safer Alternative Design Requirements
The element that isn’t: why Missouri treats a feasible alternative design as evidence, not an element—and why plaintiffs prove it anyway In many jurisdictions, the plaintiff in a design case must prove that a reasonable, feasible alternative design…
Failure-to-Warn Claims Under Missouri Law
Two causation prongs, a read-and-heed presumption that is only a submissibility device, and the one defense the legislature made complete A failure-to-warn claim concedes, for argument’s sake, that the product is soundly designed and correctly built. Its…
Manufacturing Defect Claims Under Missouri Law
Proving that one unit departed from its design—often without the unit, sometimes without an expert, and always against the malfunction doctrine’s limits The manufacturing-defect claim is the narrowest and, in one sense, the most intuitive theory in…
Design Defect Claims Under Missouri Law
The undefined standard, the cases that built it, and how design cases are actually won and lost A design-defect claim is the most conceptually ambitious species of products litigation. It does not accept the product’s blueprint and quarrel with a stray…
Who Is Liable for a Driver in a Missouri Auto Case?
After a Missouri motor vehicle crash, the first auto liability question is usually whether the driver was negligent. The next question is often harder and more valuable: whether someone else is legally responsible for that driver’s conduct. In cases…
Missouri Product Liability Law: The Complete Guide
The framework, the doctrines, the principles of safe design and safe warnings, and the practical realities of investigating and litigating a products case Product liability in Missouri is a hybrid creature, and the practitioner who forgets it will…