Photo of Michelle Yeary

It’s a fairly well known double standard. If you ask your child why he or she did that rotten, terrible, awful thing and he or she responds “just because” – that’s never good enough. When a parent is faced with the question “why,” however, “because I said so” is a fairly standard, albeit a bit of a crutch, response. If your child happens to have a litigator as a parent, the lesson that “just because” won’t cut it is learned very early. Litigators like to practice their cross-examination skills. Litigator-parents get that opportunity when faced with broken windows, missed curfews, and dented bumpers. DDL Blog litigator-parents not only cross-examine, we TwIqbal (actually seems to work well as a verb). We want supporting facts and they better be sufficient to “nudge” whatever explanation is being offered “across the line from conceivable to plausible.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 680 (2009).

That’s exactly what the judge was looking for in Staub v. Zimmer, Inc., 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 89109 (W.D. Wash. Jun. 9, 2017). Try as he might, however, he couldn’t find it. Plaintiff filed suit in Washington state alleging injury from the implantation of a prosthetic hip. Id. at *1. Following removal to federal court, defendant moved to dismiss.

In Washington, all products liability claims are subsumed under the Washington Product Liability Act (“WPLA”). Id. at *4. The WPLA allows a plaintiff to seek recovery for defective design; failure to warn; defective manufacture; or breach of express or implied warranty. Id. at *4-5. While a plaintiff does not have to specify in the complaint which precise theories he or she is pursuing, the complaint has to “contain sufficient non-conclusory factual allegations to support at least one avenue of relief.” Id. at *5. So, the court combed the Staub complaint to see if it met that basic requirement.

First, the court could find no indication anywhere in the complaint that plaintiff was alleging either failure to warn or breach of warranty. Id. at *5-6. The court was unwilling to read into the complaint claims that plaintiff appears to have failed to assert. As an aside the court pointed out that should plaintiff wish to pursue a failure to warn claim, it may be barred by the learned intermediary doctrine. Id. at *6n3. Perhaps a little foreshadowing?

The WPLA recognizes both the risk utility test and the consumer expectations test as bases for a design defect claim. So plaintiff’s complaint better have support for at least one of these theories. Plaintiff Staub, however, failed to adequately plead either. On risk utility, plaintiff only alleged that the product was “not reasonably safe.” Id. at *7. On consumer expectations, plaintiff only alleged that the device “failed to meet consumer expectations of safety.” Id. at *8. These are the pleading equivalent of “just because.” Parroting back the words of the elements of the claim do not suffice. Nowhere did plaintiff allege how a design element led to his alleged injury, whether there was a feasible alternative design, or how the product didn’t meet expectations. Id. at *7-8.

On his manufacturing claim, plaintiff failed to allege any facts showing that the device at issue deviated in any way from the intended design. Id. at *9. Once again, a bare bones allegation that the product was “defective and unreasonably dangerous” was far from satisfactory. Id. Plaintiff apparently made some attempt to save his manufacturing defect claim by alluding to the fact that the product had been voluntarily recalled. But without any allegations connecting the recall to plaintiff’s alleged injuries, the recall alone offers no support. Id. at *10n5.

Plaintiff is getting a do-over; he has 20 days to file an amended complaint. It’s sort of like, go to your room and when you come back you better having something better than “just because.”