You hit the nail on the head. And that seems to be the solution to the vast majority of situations reported on this blog. People need to take personal responsibility for their own actions. So many do not.

Jim C: What is considered reasonable though?

A little more than you did. (I would put a smiley there, but in reality it’s more of a crying than smiling situation.) It’s obvious that you didn’t do enough, because my problem still happened. If you’d only done a little more, I wouldn’t have had my problem.

But as we all know, if you’d taken that extra step, then I’d have taken the extra step to defeat your extra measure. With some people, it’s almost like a challenge to see just how many obstacles they can overcome. (Or, to put it from the designer’s perspective, to see just how stupid they can be.)

The company went out of business shortly after this. We were in the right on this and still this was allowed to happen. I was listed on the suit personally as my name was on many of the drawings in the “Designed By” box. My employer absorbed the cost of my attorney.

At what point does responsibility shift to the purchaser and/or operator? I have no problem with incorporating safety features into my designs, as a matter of fact I consider it an obligation. What is considered reasonable though?

I definitely agree with your notion that the employee had to really TRY to misuse the equipment.

It’s a “you didn’t do enough to stop me from injuring myself” situation. How do we insert at least a minium of personal responsibility into the system?

Management made a business decision here to stop having the meetings because, as a consequence of this, it’s cheaper to deal with lawsuits about things you didn’t think of than it is about things you did. So let’s stop the meetings and we can claim that we didn’t foresee that type of abuse.

Consequently, products are less safe because people are discouraged from thinking of ways that they could be unsafe.

That’s a question that only personal injury lawyers and the judges they pay to elect could answer. The common sense answer that anyone not directly profiting from a lawsuit would give is that it obviously doesn’t. But if there’s enough money involved, someone will be happy to blame the deepest pocket, regardless of the situation.

How is this EXACTLY as it should be? I agree with Jim, so that the man COULD be in a position to injure himself, he had to WILLINGLY disable numerous safety features and guards. How does this translate into ANY cash payment, much less a 30K award?

Common sense dictates that intentional misuse carries an assumption of risk, but in this day of litigation all it seems to carry is a chance for a big payoff, and that needs to change.

Kim is absolutely correct: there is NO amount of safety devices that can totally and perfectly prevent people from hurting themselves AFTER THEY ARE DISABLED.

Sure, they could have added yet MORE safety features… which could STILL have been disabled.

Your line of reasoning leaves no one responsible for their own actions, EVER. That is… well, “problematic” is the only polite thing that comes even remotely clos.

However, we have a culture that issues supposedly compensatory damages and punitive damages equal to the GNPs of small countries for single incidents. This throws risk/benefit analyses completely out of whack, and the culture of memo-waving makes it clearly optimal to do your engineering by the seat of your pants rather than meticulously with a written record.

With quarter Billion dollar judgments for single 62-year-old produce managers at WalMart who have been married less than a year, it doesn’t take many juries getting it wrong to outweigh the bulk of the juries who do their job competently.

-dk