Maritime & Offshore

Crew injuries and deaths aboard commercial vessels. Longshore and terminal work. Offshore installations, and the transport to and from them. Passenger injury aboard commercial vessels, and serious recreational boating incidents.

Also the failures that are not an injury to one person: a vessel system that failed, a mooring or crane incident at a terminal, a collision or allision, a fire aboard.

A crew member with a connection to a vessel in navigation has claims nobody else has, and no claim under ordinary workplace compensation. A worker on the dock falls under a federal compensation scheme with its own procedure and its own bar. A passenger has a contract claim and a negligence claim shaped by the ticket. Someone injured on a friend's boat has none of the above.

A vessel owner's obligation to a crew member to maintain a seaworthy vessel, and the obligation to pay maintenance and cure regardless of fault, have no equivalent in land-based law. They are also why a case that looks modest at intake can be considerably more than it appears.

Getting status wrong at the outset is the characteristic failure here, because the wrong classification quietly forecloses the correct remedy while the file proceeds confidently under the incorrect one.

Commercial passenger tickets routinely shorten the time allowed to give notice and to file, and select a specific forum. Those provisions are generally enforced. A passenger claim can be sound on the facts and unrecoverable purely because terms printed on the booking were never read by anyone in a position to act on them.

Vessel records are the other early priority: logs, voyage data, engine and machinery records, safety management documentation, crew lists, and the incident reporting made to the regulator. Crews rotate and disperse, and a witness who sailed on one contract is hard to find by the next.

Where an offshore installation, a foreign-flagged vessel or an international voyage is involved, which law governs and where the case may be brought are threshold questions with real consequences, and they are answered before the merits rather than alongside them.

This is the category where a general practice is most likely to be holding a case under the wrong body of law without knowing it. The intake looks like an ordinary injury claim. The remedies, the deadlines and the forum are all different.

An early look costs nothing and occasionally changes the entire shape of a file. Arrangements are agreed in writing before the matter moves, as co-counsel or as an outright referral.