When a cruise ship crew member is injured at sea, the first shock is the accident. The second is discovering that the employment contract they signed, often without a lawyer and on a take-it-or-leave-the-ship basis, quietly stripped away the American jury trial they assumed they had and replaced it with private arbitration in a foreign…
If you load, unload, build, or repair vessels and you get hurt on the job, you are probably covered by a federal law that most injured workers have never heard of until the day they need it. It pays your medical bills in full, replaces two-thirds of your lost wages, and does it without making…
If you are a seaman and you get hurt or sick in the service of your vessel, the law hands you something you do not have to prove fault to receive: a daily living allowance and full medical care, starting almost immediately. It is called maintenance and cure, it is one of the oldest rights…
The American offshore wind industry is being built faster than the country has boats and crews to build it safely, and that gap is showing up as injuries. Turbines rise more than 500 feet above the water, the only way onto many of them is to step from a pitching vessel, and a workforce drawn…
A fisherman goes over the rail in a heartbeat, a slip on a wet deck, a rogue wave, a line that catches a leg, and from that instant survival is measured in minutes. Federal safety researchers have studied these moments in grim detail, and what they found does more than describe a tragedy. It points…
After an oil rig accident, the question that keeps you up at night is usually a money question: what is this going to cost me, and what can I recover? There is no honest single number, but there is something better than a number. There is a framework that decides which law governs your claim,…
If you are a dock, harbor, or shipyard worker, your LHWCA benefits pay your medical bills and a slice of your wages, but they stop well short of what the injury actually cost you, no pain and suffering, and only a capped share of lost earnings. The most valuable thing you can learn after a…
A denial letter from a Defense Base Act insurer is written to sound final. It is not. The DBA was built to compensate civilians hurt working overseas for U.S. government contractors, and it hands you something most injured workers never realize they have: a legal presumption that your injury is covered, a layered appeal process…
Not every injury from overseas contract work is visible. For many civilian contractors, the lasting wound is psychological, and the law that protects them recognizes it. But a Defense Base Act PTSD claim is also one of the hardest to get paid, because what you cannot see, an insurer will dispute. Knowing how these claims…
After a serious injury on a fishing boat, the first question is almost always about money: what is my case worth, and how will I provide for my family? The figures online swing from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million, and that spread is not noise. It reflects how much the value of…
