Functional Safety Managers and Chief Product Security Officers (CPSOs) are often the “named” parties in technical documentation for automotive electronics, and their primary anxiety revolves around delineating where their professional engineering judgment ends, and legal liability begins. To this end, they employ a combination of legal directives, normative standards, best practices and company policies to reduce their legal exposure.
ISO 26262 (Functional Safety) and ISO 21434 (Cybersecurity) have been deemed “Best Practices” by automotive safety and security professionals, since these standards are (a) widely recognized in industry; and (b) lexical shortcuts that will largely satisfy regulators as accepted common norms.
However, both ISO standards are quickly morphing into “Legal Benchmarks” as more and more compliant products crowd out products that employ a different, equivalent, or non-existent approach to safety and security. This shift is even more pronounced in the European Union (EU), where ISO 21434 is subsumed by the EU’s adoption of the UNECE Regulation No. 155 (WP.29). For the United States, the concept of “State of the Art” (SOTA) is central to meeting the technical and procedural bar required by the law to reduce unreasonable safety and security risks. Again, both standards are so often referenced as the obvious means for a product to meet and exceed the SOTA, that the standards are now shedding their Best Practice label in favor of an implied Legal Benchmark appellation, likely to show up in your next product liability case.
In the 2026 automotive landscape, the SOTA is no longer a nebulous concept used in product liability defense. With the maturation of ISO 26262 and ISO 21434, SOTA has been codified through repeated practice and wide embrace. For the engineer, this means that a deviation from these standards isn’t just a technical choice; it is a potential admission of negligence, or more.
Three pitfalls that engineers should be aware of when a Best Practice becomes a Legal Benchmark
The Personal Liability Shift
Under traditional tort law, the company’s corporate veil generally protects individual engineers from monetary damages, and most legal proceedings remain a civil matter. Failure to adequately follow the standards more often results in adverse civil judgments when Legal Benchmarks are missed, but also may additionally prompt an inquiry by a regulatory agency as to why the legal benchmark was not met.
However, as automotive electronics and software-defined vehicles (SDVs) become more complex, regulatory bodies are looking closer at the written formal safety case for each product that manufacturers launch into the stream of commerce. The Legal Benchmark expectation causes the agency to look harder. If a Functional Safety Manager signs off on an ASIL-D system knowing that the HARA (Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment) was incomplete or that FFI (Freedom from Interference work product) was not properly validated, the findings move from the realm of “honest error” into “reckless disregard”, which may result in personal criminal charges being handed down by an enterprising prosecutor.
The HARA and TARA as Discovery Documents
In the event of a cybersecurity-related collision, both the HARA and the TARA (Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment) documents produced under ISO 26262 and ISO 21434 will be the first documents requested in the mandatory discovery process. They are no longer just “nice to have” pieces of evidence, but effectively become required documentation under the Legal Benchmark expectation.
- Many engineering teams treat the HARA or TARA as a living document to improve the system. While this is an approach true to the standards, this leeway ceases as soon as the first saleable vehicle unit is produced.
- To a plaintiff’s attorney, an unaddressed “High” risk in a HARA or TARA is a “smoking gun.”
Bridging the “Safety-Security Gap”
The most significant legal exposure exists where safety and security seem to conflict. For example, a cybersecurity lockout (ISO 21434) that inadvertently disables a safety-critical braking function (ISO 26262) can go undetected in many organizations that operate in engineering domain silos. If your Safety Manager and your Cybersecurity Lead are working in silos, your firm is creating a “Liability Gap” that is nearly impossible to defend in front of a jury.
Guibert.law Insight on ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434 Legal Benchmarks
Courts are increasingly looking for “Integrated Lifecycle Management” — a documented, auditable system that demonstrates both safety and security have been addressed in a coordinated, non-siloed manner throughout the product lifecycle.
The Guibert.law Approach To Using Integrated Lifecycle Management
Protect the Driving Public: we emphasize that the best way to defend from all types of liability is to perform the safety and security work, under the standards, such that the performance of the products is never called in to question, because the safety and security work actually did remove all unreasonable risks. This means that the safety and security cases must be robustly technically and procedurally sufficient in the real world. Additionally, this may be achieved in combination with other safety standards such as ISO 21448 (SOTIF or Safety Of The Intended Function), for example. An Integrated Lifecycle Management system can document all the necessary steps, and serve as discoverable documentation that will help you demonstrate to the authorities that the safety and security cases are not haphazardly created, but track a Legal Benchmark.
Protect your Engineering Team: we enable your risk management team and your engineering team to mitigate the possibility of mistakes and legal gaps in the work that your engineering team produces under these ISO standards. Creating an environment, via an Integrated Lifecycle Management system, where your engineering team is legally protected in the normal course of its business activities, will generate the maximum personal and institutional confidence in their work. For example, resolving apparent conflicts between apparently competing Legal Benchmarks can create some organizational chaos, or procedural complexity. We can help resolve these apparent conflicts, so that the safety and security case authors and their design-responsible staff are not confronted with impossible choices or are not neglectful of either Legal Benchmark.
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