Evaluating how design, perception, and behavior contribute to injury.
Human factors analysis of product design, warnings, and use in personal injury and product liability cases.
We evaluate how people actually interact with objects, equipment, and environments, their capabilities, limitations, and performance, particularly in cases involving product design, warnings, or use. That draws on engineering, safety, physics, industrial design, and psychology together, not any one of them alone.
Cases involving improper ladder use, merchandise stacking and shelving injuries, furniture and chair hazards, machinery-related incidents, and product design failures, right down to household glass fractures and, at the other end of the spectrum, air traffic control failures.
Sight and hearing come up constantly: how well-lit was the stairwell, how visible was the object in the road, what was the conspicuity of what the person needed to see. We also weigh physical factors like fatigue and psychological ones, perception-reaction time, behavioral expectations, how someone processes information under pressure, against the actual design, warnings, and foreseeable use of whatever was involved.
[PLACEHOLDER: real case scenario from Michael]
How does this differ from a product liability claim? Human factors often supports a product liability case, but it specifically addresses how a person interacted with and responded to a product or environment, not just whether the product itself was defective.