§ 25-21,182.Product liability action; based upon negligent or defective design, testing, or labeling; defense.

A design-defect claim often turns on whether the manufacturer could have built a safer product with the technology available at the time. Section 25-21,182 gives manufacturers a defense built around that question. In a product liability action based on negligent or defective design, testing, or labeling, proof that the design, testing, or labeling conformed to the generally recognized and prevailing state of the art in the industry, at the time the specific product was first sold to someone outside the business of selling it, works as a defense.

The statute defines the term rather than leaving it to argument: state of the art means the best technology reasonably available at the time. That phrasing looks forward from the moment of first sale, not backward from the moment of trial. A manufacturer does not have to show its product was the safest one imaginable in hindsight; it has to show the design, testing, or labeling matched the best technology the industry could reasonably reach when the product left the manufacturer’s hands and reached its first buyer.

Because the defense is tied to industry-wide practice rather than one company’s own choices, it asks the fact finder to compare the challenged product against what was generally recognized and prevailing across the industry at that time, not against a single competitor’s product or a later-developed improvement.