How Does Georgia Decide If a Product’s Design Is Defective? The Risk-Utility Test

By weighing the risks of the design against its usefulness. In Banks v. ICI Americas, Inc. (1994), the Supreme Court of Georgia adopted a test “balancing the risks inherent in a product design against the utility of the product so designed”, and called the “essential inquiry” “whether the design chosen was a reasonable one from among the feasible choices of which the manufacturer was aware or should have been aware”. Evidence of a safer, feasible alternative design is central to that question.

What Banks changed

Before Banks, a line of Georgia decisions treated a product as non-defective if it was “reasonably suited for its intended purpose” and functioned in its intended use. Banks disapproved that approach to the extent it conflicted, holding that “we can no longer accept the position that a manufacturer cannot be liable for injuries proximately caused by a product that functions for its intended use, regardless of the risks associated with the product and its utility to the public” or the evidence of a feasible alternative design. The case involved a nine-year-old who died after ingesting a rodenticide he found in an unmarked container at a boys’ club, a product that worked exactly as intended.

The balance the jury strikes

Banks described the analysis as asking “whether the manufacturer acted reasonably in choosing a particular product design, given”:

1. “the probability and seriousness of the risk posed by the design”,
2. “the usefulness of the product in that condition”, and
3. “the burden on the manufacturer to take the necessary steps to eliminate the risk”.

The Court declined to fix a closed list: “no finite set of factors can be considered comprehensive or applicable under every factual circumstance”. It named “competing cost trade-offs, tactical market decisions, product development and research/testing demands, the idiosyncrasies of individual corporate management styles, and federal and other regulatory restrictions” as matters that “can enter into a consideration of the reasonableness of a manufacturer’s decision-making process”.

The alternative-design evidence

Banks noted that weighing alternative designs is considered the “heart” of design defect cases, citing a legal annotation, and held that the trier of fact “may consider evidence establishing that at the time the product was manufactured, an alternative design would have made the product safer than the original design and was a marketable reality and technologically feasible”. Three points follow from that wording:

• When: the alternative must have existed “at the time the product was manufactured”, not years later.
• Marketable: the alternative had to be “a marketable reality” at that time.
• Feasible: it had to be “technologically feasible” then.

What the test does not require

Banks reaffirmed that “a manufacturer is not an insurer that its product is, from a design viewpoint, incapable of producing injury”. A dangerous product is not automatically defectively designed; the question is whether the design was a reasonable choice given the risk, the benefit, and the alternatives.

How the test fits the rest of a product case

The risk-utility test applies to design claims. A unit that departs from its own design, or a missing warning, is analyzed differently; see manufacturing defect, design defect, or failure to warn. The claim must also be brought within the ten-year statute of repose for strict liability, measured from the product’s first sale; see Georgia’s product liability statute of repose. And the injured person’s own fault can reduce the award: in Johns v. Suzuki Motor of America, Inc. (2020), the Supreme Court held that the apportionment statute, § 51-12-33(a), applies to strict product liability claims.

Evidence that tests a design

1. The product’s design documents and the date of manufacture.
2. Competing products or industry designs available at that time.
3. Testing, incident, and complaint records known to the manufacturer.
4. Expert analysis of cost, function, and safety trade-offs.

Sources

• O.C.G.A. §§ 51-1-11, 51-12-33.
• Banks v. ICI Americas, Inc., 264 Ga. 732 (1994)
• Johns v. Suzuki Motor of America, Inc., 310 Ga. 159 (2020)

General information about Georgia law as of October 2026. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.