Is a Warning Inadequate if Plaintiff Never Reads It?

By Gerald P. Panaro, Esq., Howe & Hutton, Ltd.

One panel of the Illinois Court of Appeals has held that a manufacturer can be held liable for defective warnings, even if the plaintiff never read them; a second panel of the same court has reached an opposite result. In the first case, the appellate court held welding material suppliers liable for allegedly insufficient warnings even though the plaintiff admitted he never read the warnings at all. The defendants are appealing to the Illinois Supreme Court to overturn a jury verdict of $1 million in favor of the plaintiff, which one panel of the Illinois Court of Appeal upheld.

The defendants have asked the Illinois Supreme Court to resolve the dispute between the two Illinois appellate court decisions on point, one involving a failure to read warnings on packages made available to the plaintiff, and the second where the claim is that the warnings on welding rod packages were insufficient because they were not on individual welding rods, and the plaintiff welder did not have access to the package which featured the warning. The plaintiff alleges he never saw the warning, not that he failed to read it.

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