Product Defects and the Duty to Speak After Halpern v. Ricoh

Litigation attorney Siobhan Cole published an article in The Legal Intelligencer dissecting the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision in Halpern v. Ricoh, which concerned the actionability of deceptive omission claims under the state's Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law (UTPCPL). In the case, a consumer who purchased a camera from Ricoh argued the company violated the catch-all provision of UTPCPL by not disclosing a known defect at the time of sale. Ricoh countered that deceptive omissions under the statute require a duty to speak, it did not have a duty to disclose here and thus the claims were not actionable. The Supreme Court agreed, affirming that such a claim is actionable only where a responsible party has an affirmative duty to disclose the subject of the omission. As Ms. Cole explains, the court went a step further by addressing the plaintiff's argument that sellers have a duty to make disclosures where products do not meet ordinary consumer expectations of minimum performance. Although the court agreed in part, it clarified that the appropriate cause of action is breach of an express warranty or breach of the implied warranty of merchantability, not a UTPCPL deceptive omission claim. To conclude her analysis, Ms. Cole calls out two key aspects of the ruling: Deceptive omission claims under the UTPCPL are not meant to supplement or supplant warranty law, and in Pennsylvania, knowledge of a product defect is not the touchstone for a duty to speak.

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