Charles Brown v. Crown Equipment Corporation, A/k/a Crown Equipment Corp.

Summary

The court held that the trial court improperly treated all five reliability factors as mandatory when evaluating the plaintiffs’ expert testimony. Because the experts relied substantially on practical experience, existing data, and an alternative design already used in some forklifts, the trial court should have applied only those factors that reasonably measured the methodologies at issue. The court also held that, viewing the admissible expert evidence favorably to the plaintiffs, reasonable minds could disagree about whether the forklifts were defective or unreasonably dangerous, so a directed verdict was improper.