Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1994

Abstract

In my experience, lawyers begin negotiating only after the business people have decided upon the description and quality of the product, the time of delivery, and the mode and amount of payment. The lawyers are left with the pathological problems--who gets what in case of trouble. Most of those problems relate to the seller's responsibility if the product does not conform to the contract or otherwise fails to please the buyer. These failures can cause economic loss to the buyer, economic loss to a remote purchaser, or personal injury or property damage to immediate or remote parties. Third parties may have relationships with the buyer or a remote purchaser or may themselves be remote purchasers of the product. To give a nonexclusive list, potential plaintiffs suing the manufacturer/ seller (Seller) could be the buyer, remote buyers, employees of either, or third parties who are unrelated (bystanders to an accident) or who are actually purchasing the use of the product (passengers on an airplane that crashes). one way to organize one's thinking is to visualize all of the potential plaintiffs and to speculate about all of the potential causes of action that they might assert against the original seller and against people that might intervene between the original seller and the plaintiff.


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