Product Design Expert Witnesses
Product design decisions determine manufacturability, cost, safety, and market appeal, and the commercial relationships behind them produce disputes when a design fails to deliver on any of those fronts. Brand owners sue contract design firms whose products could not be manufactured at the promised cost or yield, OEMs pursue suppliers whose components failed qualification or field performance, and companies facing recalls seek indemnity or contribution from the parties responsible for a defective design element. Design is also central to intellectual property disputes, including design patent and utility patent infringement, trade dress, reverse engineering, and claims that a former partner's product appropriated confidential design work. The underlying question is whether the design and the process that produced it met contractual specifications, industry standards, and the protected rights of others.
A product design expert evaluates the design history and the product itself, reviewing specifications, design reviews, tolerance analyses, prototypes, test data, and failure modes to determine whether accepted design and validation practices were followed. Teardowns and comparative analysis can show whether a defect originated in the design, a supplier's component, or a manufacturing deviation, which frequently determines how responsibility and costs are allocated among commercial parties. In intellectual property matters, the expert compares designs at the level of function, form, and engineering detail to assess infringement, independent development, or design-around. Those findings support breach of contract, warranty, indemnity, and infringement theories, provide a technical basis for recall, redesign, and lost-profit damages, and equip counsel to rebut an opposing expert's account of how the product was designed or why it failed.
Product design spans industrial design, mechanical and electronic engineering, human factors, manufacturing processes, and regulated medical products, so the right expert depends on where in the design cycle the dispute arose. Among the professionals we can present are industrial designers who have testified on patent infringement, reverse engineering, and design uniqueness, a product development engineer specializing in medical products who has testified on patent validity and product liability, and an injection molding specialist who has testified on product failure, quality specifications, and intellectual property. The network also includes a human factors expert who has published on ANSI and ISO safety symbol standards and a chemical engineer who directs the largest academic research organization focused on pharmaceutical product and process design. Round Table Group brings more than 75,000 expert searches for litigators to the task of matching that expertise to your case, and you can start that process by calling us at (202) 908-4500.
