Plaintiff, a production supervisor for Lockheed, was injured when the scaffolding on which he was standing partially collapsed. Visioneering designed and manufactured the scaffolding, referred to as the Unit 5 intertank platform, in accordance with a Statement of Work (SOW) that Lockheed provided to Visioneering. At trial, the jury found Visioneering 30% at fault and Lockheed 70% at fault. On appeal, Visioneering argued that the jury’s finding of a “superceding or intervening cause” (namely the failure to perform point-load testing on the Unit 5 intertank platform) conflicts with the finding that Visioneering was 30% at fault. “A manufacturer of an unreasonably dangerous product will be relieved of liability” noted the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in affirming the judgment, “only if an intervening cause superseded the original negligence and alone produced the injury. Foreseeable intervening forces are within the scope of the original risk and, therefore, will not relieve the manufacturer of liability. Visioneering’s duty under the Louisiana Products Liability Act to provide intertank platforms without any unreasonably dangerous characteristics in design included the foreseeable risk that Lockheed would subsequently fail to perform the necessary point-load test, and that failure would lead to Paul Mazant’s injury. As Visioneering contends, its failure to perform the point-load test may have been predicatedon ‘negligence,’ but this ‘negligence’ occurred in the design phase, creating an unreasonably dangerous product under the LPLA. Therefore, the plaintiffs did not prevail based on a separate claim of negligence, apart from the LPLA, but instead under the LPLA by proving that the point-load test should have been performed as part of the design of the Unit 5 intertank platform.” See Mazant v. Visioneering, Inc., No.06-30758, 2007 WL 2908082 (5th Cir. Oct. 4, 2007).
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