Class action lawsuits expose manufacturers to enormous financial risk.
Mark Raffman, partner in Goodwin Procter's Business Litigation Practice
Opportunities for Communication
When problems arise, there are multiple opportunities for contact and communication between the customer, the installer, and the manufacturer.
Improving and encouraging consumers to connect with customer support around reported issues provides a fertile opportunity for feedback on the performance of their products under different conditions.
Tracking and analyzing patterns in this feedback can also suggest new information about a product -- for example, that a product's function is affected by certain environmental or other factors in a specific way, including the installation process or specific facts about the individual's dwelling. Likewise, developing a robust process for responding to consumer complaints (including investigation of individual homeowners' circumstances and remedying legitimate complaints) can generate an individualized body of evidence.
To the extent that this process generates an increasingly-differentiated data set of product-use outcomes based on differing circumstances, and communications between and among manufacturers, installers, and homeowners, it has great potential to generate the kind of evidence that should prevent class certification under the Dukes ruling.
