Product Liability: Class Actions Are Increasingly Using Economic Loss To Bring Claims

A trend in product liability litigation has emerged over the past few years: Plaintiffs' attorneys are increasingly choosing to bring class actions based on "economic loss" instead of the more traditional personal injury claim.

Economic loss refers to circumstances in which an individual or organization loses money. Andrew Kaplan, a partner in Crowell & Moring's Mass Tort, Product, and Consumer Litigation Practice and co-chair of the firm's Litigation Group, offers an example.

"Let's say a person unwittingly buys a pharmaceutical product that contains a proven or alleged carcinogenic ingredient," Kaplan says. "The person could say that she suffered an economic loss because she bought a product that shouldn't have been sold and decides to sue the product's manufacturer on the grounds that the product was either worthless or worth less than what she paid for it."