On November 30, 2016, the Georgia Supreme Court in CertainTeed Corp. v. Fletcher, 794 S.E.2d 641 (2016), found that a manufacturer of asbestos-laden water pipes had no duty to warn the daughter of a man who worked with the pipes. The plaintiff daughter alleged that she contracted malignant pleural mesothelioma as a result of years of laundering her father’s asbestos-covered work clothing. She claimed that the manufacturer had negligently designed the water pipe and negligently failed to warn of the hazards associated with the pipe. The trial court granted the defendant manufacturer’s motion for summary judgment, and the Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed.

Under current Georgia law, the duty to warn arises whenever the manufacturer knows or reasonably should know of the danger arising from the use of its product. Chrysler Corp. v. Batten, 264 Ga. 723, 724 (1994). However, this duty is owed only to consumers, purchasers of the product, reasonably foreseeable users, and, in some cases, reasonably foreseeable third parties. DeLoach v. Rovema Corp., 241 Ga. App. 802, 804 (2000); Vickery v. Waste Management of Georgia, 249 Ga. App. 659 (2001); R&R Insulation Svcs., Inc. v. Royal Indem. Co., 307 Ga. App. 419 (2010).

Here, the Supreme Court found that it was unreasonable to impose a duty on the manufacturer to warn all individuals in the plaintiff’s position of the hazard. The Court further held that allowing the plaintiff’s claim would “expand traditional tort concepts beyond manageable bounds and create an almost infinite universe of potential plaintiffs.” The Court rejected the Court of Appeals’ conclusion that a warning on the pipe could have permitted the plaintiff’s father to mitigate the danger posed by asbestos, noting that the warning would not have been systematically distributed because the onus would have been on the worker, not the manufacturer, to keep third parties safe.

However, the Court reversed the trial court’s grant of summary judgment as to the plaintiff’s design defect claim, holding that the appropriate analysis for this claim did not depend on the use of the product but, rather, whether the product was defectively designed under the risk-utility analysis. The Court emphasized that the burden was on CertainTeed to show “plainly and indisputably an absence of any evidence that a produced as designed is defective.”

If you have further questions about the foregoing case or how it may relate to issues facing your company or practice, please contact Tina Cheng or any other attorney at Nall & Miller, LLP.