Welcome to ‘E-commerce Liability’ by CaseyGerry, a site dedicated to the practice area of product liability and consumer protection in the digital age.
Over the last several years, online retail has progressively surpassed brick-and-mortar shopping in popularity. But when it comes to online retail practices and product safety standards, the law is playing catch up.
Product liability law—the name given to the body of law designed to protect consumers from defective products and hold makers and sellers of those products responsible for the damage they cause—was developed well before e-commerce came into being. It worked for those times, but changes in commerce have made some of the provisions of traditional product liability difficult to apply.
E-commerce, and in particular online “marketplaces,” have disrupted the traditional retail model. Where it was once relatively simple to discern discrete roles in the chain of product distribution, e.g., manufacturer, distributor, and retailer, it is no longer so. Now, an online marketplace may take on part of one or more of those roles, meaning it could do some things a manufacturer does and some things a retailer does, without clearly being either one or the other.
E-commerce liability thought-leader Jeremy K. Robinson, the attorney behind the precedent-setting appeal in Bolger v. Amazon.com, and a force driving the creation of more effective liability laws against e-tailers (e-commerce retailers) has launched this website in hopes of providing a comprehensive knowledge-resource for lawyers, judges, journalists, and anyone else interested in the advancement of consumer protection laws in e-commerce liability.
Attorney Robinson, a partner at the San Diego-based law firm CaseyGerry, and chair of the Motion and Appellate practice, can be reached at (619) 238-1811.