Product Risk Management
Crowell & Moring LLP has a Product Risk Management Practice that offers ample experience working with consumer and industrial product manufacturers, component suppliers, sellers and distributors in identifying and managing risks and navigating legal and regulatory regimes, both domestically and internationally, as clients develop strategies to grow their businesses and throughout the resulting products' life cycles. We have particular experience working with clients who seek to extend their valuable brand names into new product areas where they encounter unfamiliar legal and regulatory terrain.
Crowell & Moring lawyers have extensive experience working with companies that supply consumer products, durable goods, industrial inputs, components, and information, communication, and technology services, and guiding them through the issues that arise as those products are first conceived in design through manufacturing and after they leave the factory doors and make their way to end users. We work with clients to maximize the value of their products and their brands at every step of the product's lifecycle and distribution chain – and to minimize unpleasant surprises, whether they come from litigation, adverse regulatory action, or damage to brand value through identifying and managing risks.
Click for more information on Crowell & Moring's Distribution Management and Brand Stewardship practice.
Our team includes lawyers from all of our offices (Washington, California, New York, Brussels and London) and is multi-disciplinary so that we bring expertise in the wide range of necessary legal fields this work requires – including torts, consumer protection, advertising, labeling, privacy and data protection, antitrust, environmental and health, international, and trade regulation among others. This enables us to handle the full range of commercial and regulatory legal issues facing our clients in a comprehensive and integrated approach. We also find ourselves regularly before the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Customs and Borders Protection (CBP), the European Commission, and other product-related federal, state and international agencies.
Our experience and expertise spans a wide range of issues and industries, such as:
In summary, our approach is:
To address the full lifecycle of product-related legal issues. We partner with clients to develop comprehensive risk evaluation and early warning systems to reduce life-cycle product costs for existing and new product ventures. Our experience, and the experiences of our clients, confirm that well-structured, front-end investment in these systems consistently produce significant cost savings and the avoidance of lawsuits and claims over the life of the products our clients produce, sell and support. We team experienced tort litigators and trial lawyers with regulatory and prevention counselors and our clients to develop programs and processes that envision how government regulators, courts and opposing counsel may characterize events months or years in the future.
To embrace regulatory authorities. Our clients do not run and hide from regulatory agencies or from tort or regulatory legal requirements. They instead build good will and trust, constructing relationships with agency officials that grow over time. Crowell & Moring regularly helps our clients to meet regulatory authorities and come to know them. Over and over, as other regulated entities suffer fallout from “run and hide” strategies, our clients build on the trust they have developed to avoid adverse agency action.
To “become” our clients. We work intensely to build knowledge and understanding of our clients' products, industries, corporate philosophies, business goals and strategies, then tailor our legal advice and representation to our client's needs and personality. We often come to serve as their institutional memory when it comes to developing new areas of business and evaluating a product's legal history and track record.
To understand, then achieve, victory. We learn early how our clients define “victory” in the potential outcome of product-related legal challenges, and direct our counseling and regulatory efforts accordingly. We can think of no occasion in which a Crowell & Moring client has expressed displeasure in our handling of a product risk management matter, or in the outcome we helped our clients to achieve.
To be mindful of costs. Our clients tell us that we fret about legal costs as much as they do. We can field a diverse team of Product Risk Management attorneys, each possessing varying levels of experience and offering corresponding rates, enabling us to manage product matters efficiently and cost effectively.