Defective Fireworks Case

An East Texas child was lighting a sparkler at a 4th of July celebration when the sparkler flashed violently down the entire length of sparkler causing severe burns to the child's hand. During the manufacturing process the fireworks manufacturer had allowed an excessive amount of accelerant to be added to the sparklers causing them to burn violently when lit.

International products liability cases are not for the victim who is in a hurry or the lawyer looking to make easy money. In this case we filed a products liability lawsuit in Smith County, Texas. The fireworks stand pointed to the local distributor, the local distributor pointed to the regional distributor and the regional distributor pointed to the importer. The vast majority of the fireworks consumed in America are manufactured in China and exported by Hong Kong companies who are liable under Texas products liability laws.

We identified the Hong Kong company that was responsible for the defective fireworks. The good news about suing a Hong Kong company is that Hong Kong is a member of the Hague Convention and Hong Kong companies can thus be sued pursuant to the international service of process provisions of the Hague Convention. The bad news is that Hong Kong officials and process servers are not overly cooperative. The Hague Convention requires that the lawsuit be translated into the native language of the country in which the defendant is located so we had our lawsuit translated into Mandarin Chinese and sent it through international channels to be served. During the first attempted service the defendant company denied that they were the company that was listed both on the petition and on the sign on their door so the process server returned the process unserved. We went back to Court and obtained an order authorizing service upon anyone at the business address regardless of whether they admitted being the company listed on their door and, assuming that the first process server had been bribed, employed a different process company which successfully served the defendant. This entire process took a little over a year.

After more than thirty-seven years and thousands of personal injury cases there is virtually nothing that we haven't seen and successfully handled. There is no substitute for experience. If you want the assistance of an experienced Board Certified Personal Injury Attorney in the Tyler / Longview / East Texas area contact us today.