Class Actions & Product Liability

Our internal and affiliated experts are experienced in assessing consumer understanding, decision making, and damages in mass tort and class action product liability matters. Such matters have involved claims related to product or marketing defects in the context of food and nutritional supplement products, consumer goods, pharmaceutical products, and building materials.

For class action cases, we support clients at the class certification stage by evaluating issues related to Rule 23 commonality and typicality, such as consumer heterogeneity. We use consumer surveys and archival analysis to assess varying and individualized reasons for purchase, product usage, and type and degree of harm. For example, we often evaluate different sources of publicly available information to assess whether consumer awareness and understanding of product information put out by a company (including omissions or “failures to warn” about an alleged defect) were highly similar or heterogeneous. Such assessments can, under certain requirements, be complemented with systematic analyses of user-generated content – such as online reviews – using natural language processing (NLP) tools.

For questions of liability and damages, our teams evaluate whether and to what extent the alleged product defect caused the plaintiffs’ asserted harm. We also assess the degree of heterogeneity in the harm suffered by class members and determine whether standard methods can be used to evaluate damages on a class-wide basis. In pharmaceutical product liability cases, our experts may apply biostatistical analysis to adverse event data or health insurance claim data to evaluate causality and heterogeneity and measure the potential economic loss associated with claims that the alleged defect rendered the product worthless.

Our Methods

Our methods include: 

  • Test/control experiments – We have experience using test/control experimental designs to isolate the causal effect of a particular product characteristic or at-issue product information on consumer perceptions, purchase decisions, or other consumer behavior.
  • Question-and-answer surveys – We have used traditional question-and-answer surveys to measure aided and unaided consumer awareness of at-issue product information and to assess consumer perceptions of products or services.
  • Archival analysis – Analysis Group experts rely on data science and NLP to analyze news articles, press releases, social media posts, online product reviews, and other sources to assess contemporaneous attitudes and the “voice of the consumer.” Such analyses may inform questions about the degree of heterogeneity of putative class members’ reasons for purchase, product usage, or experience with the product.
  • Purchase funnel – The purchase funnel framework – the examination of each step up to the purchase decision, as well as post-purchase factors such as customer satisfaction – can be critical to the determination of whether all the members of a putative class were aware of and affected by the alleged conduct.
  • Biostatistical analysis – In product liability matters related to pharmaceuticals or other consumer health products, our experts use biostatistical analysis of health insurance data and adverse events data to assess the heterogeneity of consumer harm.
  • Marketplace analysis – By collecting and analyzing large volumes of consumer-facing information and company data – including daily pricing data, discounting, and transaction-level data – our consultants help ascertain exposure and damages.

Our Methods