The Liability of Reliability

Product development, maintenance, and operational risks are routinely assessed based on historical data and industry best practices. And the four major elements of reliability engineering: science, engineering, human behavior and ethics are generally perceived as the primary elements of the discipline. However, there is another aspect of reliability engineering that is becoming recognized as an important aspect of both operational and product risk management: liability risk. These risks involve financial penalties caused by either a breach of contract, system failure, a safety-related incident or an unexpected system-related event. Various types of insurance offer protection post-accident but there is often a gap between routine risk management decision-making and the operational lessons learned from a liability perspective. This paper shows that pertinent case law can be compiled to assist in making and justifying operational, design and product development decisions. Legal-related issues are usually referred to licensed practitioners skilled in the law for the specialized, pertinent fields. The legal community is well equipped to manage these risks once an event has occurred and a claim or court suit is filed. But there is often a disconnect between the legal consequences of reliability and the data reliability engineers apply to perform FMECAs and related risk management. Information may be known inside a given company or from public investigations of large scale accidents, but most of the product liability and reliability related claims are not compiled or documented from a reliability perspective. The task for reliability and risk professionals is to locate meaningful data sources. The objective of this work is to provide reliability and risk management practitioners information of failure mode scenarios to improve decision-making and to raise the awareness that liability case law can be an extremely asset for operational risk management and product development.