In any product liability case, you have rights in contract and in negligence. You have a contract with people you deal with directly (for example, the person or company who sold the product to you). You have rights in negligence against people who were indirectly responsible for the product being available for you (for example, the person or company who made the product, the distributor of the product to the person who sold to you).
In order to be sure everybody is included in your product liability claim, all the way from the manufacturer to the person who sold it to you, your lawyer needs to know the name of each person or company in the ‘chain’. A complete chain means no one will be able to say “It wasn’t me, it was company X, who is not in this lawsuit.”
