Page "Product liability" Paragraph 18

The difficulty with negligence is that it still requires the plaintiff to prove that the defendant's conduct fell below the relevant standard of care.

However, if an entire industry tacitly settles on a somewhat careless standard of conduct ( that is, as analyzed from the perspective of a layperson ), then the plaintiff may not be able to recover even though he or she is severely injured, because although the defendant's conduct caused his or her injuries, such conduct was not negligent in the legal sense ( if everyone within the trade would inevitably testify that the defendant's conduct conformed to that of a reasonable tradeperson in such circumstances ).

As a practical matter, with the increasing complexity of products, injuries, and medical care ( which made many formerly fatal injuries survivable ), it is quite a difficult and expensive task to find and retain good expert witnesses who can establish the standard of care, breach, and causation.