Usually you get 3 years from the injury date in Michigan to file a product case, and if that deadline passes, your claim is usually dead.

Example: a woman in Kalamazoo changes a tire during construction season after getting forced onto a rough shoulder near a lane shift on I-94. The car jack fails, the car drops, and she gets crushed hard enough to need months of treatment while pregnant. A year later, she is still dealing with pain, fetal monitoring bills, and missed work. Two years later, she finds out the jack model had a recall. She still may have a case - but the clock did not restart just because she learned about the recall late.

Here is the hard truth in Michigan: product cases usually turn on when you were injured, not when you figured out the product was defective.

Michigan product liability claims can be brought against:

• the manufacturer
• sometimes the seller or distributor
• an installer or repair shop if bad installation or assembly helped cause the injury

Michigan no longer gives injured people the broad old-school strict liability break many assume exists. You usually have to prove the product was defective and that the defendant was negligent in making, selling, or installing it. If there was a recall, that can help show the defect was real, but a recall by itself does not automatically win the case.

If you were pregnant, the claim can include your own injury care plus pregnancy-related monitoring tied to the incident. If the baby was injured, that can raise separate damage issues, but the medical records need to connect the crash and the product failure to the harm.

Save the jack, packaging, receipt, photos, recall notice, and all records from the ER, OB, and follow-up care. If the 3-year filing deadline is close or gone, that timing problem matters more than anything else.