KitchenAid Class Action Lawsuit

Why KitchenAid Class Action Lawsuits Might Be More Valuable Than Self-Cleaning Ovens?

A class action lawsuit has recently been filed against KitchenAid Corporation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California challenging its alleged failure to warn of its dangerous tendency to fall or break unexpectedly, causing serious property damage and possible injuries to the consumer. If this sounds familiar, you may be wondering what a class action lawsuit is, and how it works.

Essentially, in a class action suit, people who are joining together in a lawsuit are given a certain amount of time to recover their own losses and those of other plaintiffs; the goal is to assign a monetary value to each person’s claim. This monetary value is based on the actual monetary loss suffered by all members of the class.

KitchenAid Class Action Lawsuit

According to the complaint, on the very day that KitchenAid employed its “defective dishwasher rack adjuster,” they should have discovered that the rack adjuster was dangerous and should not have used it.

The problem with this claim is that no injury or death has ever been reported as a result of using the defective dishwasher rack adjuster. Further, in reviewing the sales literature that accompanied the dishwasher, none of the plaintiffs’ claims regarding the dangers of the rack adjuster were raised or admitted by the KitchenAid Company.

Further, after learning that KitchenAid failed to warn of the danger of the adjuster, and deciding to use it anyway despite the obvious danger, and the injury that supposedly resulted from using the defective rack adjuster, plaintiffs argue that the company knew or should have known that using the said dishwasher rack adjuster could cause serious injury or even death.

It is clear from the above paragraph that plaintiffs essentially are asking the court to declare that KitchenAid has a duty to warn of the dangers of the defective dishwasher/top rack adjuster.

This would essentially require that the manufacturer of the product to be a nuisance law unto itself, seeking damages for allowing consumers to use potentially dangerous products. However, it is unlikely that a class action lawsuit would support such a broad claim.

There are many class actions in which the plaintiffs simply ask the court to award damages (or an equivalent judgment) for other consumers who were injured as a result of the defendant’s negligence. Such lawsuits obviously cannot survive summary judgment in a class action situation.

The reason is that we typically see class action lawsuits when an injured party brings a wrongful death claim to recover damages following the death of a member of the class.

This is the most common way to litigate a civil case. However, there is another way to create a class-action lawsuit and that is to allow each individual in the class to receive compensation on a comparative basis.

For instance, let’s say that each of the individual plaintiffs in the lawsuit are given a lump sum settlement after the settlement has been awarded. Each individual then has the right to receive compensation that is a multiple of the actual settlement award. Now, this may not seem like a very good reason to file a class action lawsuit.

However, if we were to examine the potential class action lawsuit advantages associated with this scenario, we would find an abundance of benefits for the class members.

First, the settlement would come with a multi-million dollar pay out! Second, there is a much greater chance that the individual plaintiffs will receive monetary damages that are more than their own perceived losses. Finally, there is a much greater opportunity for the individual plaintiffs to receive meaningful monetary compensation that will make their suffering go away.

In the instant case, we saw a potential class action lawsuit advantage created by the defendant’s negligence and the consequent injuries of the individual plaintiffs.

Now, let’s examine the potential advantages of a class action lawsuit regarding a defective self-cleaning ovens lawsuit. If we assume that the manufacturers’ general negligence is found to have caused the injuries, then the potential class members, collectively, could recover not only their direct losses resulting from the injury, but also future losses due to the same manufacturer’s negligence.

This will include medical expenses, suffering wages, pain and suffering, and so on. The potential class members will not be paid any damages until such time as the manufacturer pays out its remaining obligations to each individual plaintiff.