Third Party Shipyard and
Marine Terminal Claims

Longshoremen, shipyard employees, and other harbor workers already have a workers’ compensation system through the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act — but that system only covers claims against your own employer. When your injury is caused by someone else, a different contractor, a vessel’s crew, or the terminal itself, that opens the door to a separate third-party claim. This is a substantial part of what we handle, and these cases are hard, because they often run straight into the government.

Marine terminals and shipyards are some of the most complex work environments in maritime law, with multiple companies, subcontractors, and vessel crews all operating in the same physical space at the same time. That complexity is exactly why so many injuries in this setting involve someone other than the injured worker’s own employer — and exactly why so many attorneys who don’t specialize in maritime law miss the third-party claim sitting right alongside the workers’ comp case.

A significant share of our practice involves exactly these cases, in part because Hampton Roads is home to some of the busiest shipyards and marine terminals on the East Coast. We know the major employers, contractors, and government facilities operating in this region, and that familiarity helps us move quickly when a new case comes in.

We’ve represented harbor workers hurt by cargo equipment failures, careless subcontractors, and vessel crews across nearly every major terminal and shipyard in this region. That depth of experience means we’re rarely encountering a new type of worksite or a new government contracting structure for the first time — we’ve usually seen a version of it before.

If you’re hurt on the job as a harbor worker, you’ll typically have a workers’ compensation claim through your employer under the Longshore Act. But if the fault lies with someone else — a subcontractor, another company’s crew, the vessel owner — Section 905(b) of that same law lets you bring a separate negligence claim against that third party, on top of your workers’ comp benefits.

This structure exists because the Longshore Act’s workers’ comp system, like most workers’ comp systems, prevents you from suing your own employer for negligence in exchange for guaranteed no-fault benefits. But Congress recognized that harbor workers are often injured by parties who aren’t their employer at all — a different stevedoring company, a ship’s crew, an equipment manufacturer — and Section 905(b) preserves your right to hold those parties fully accountable.

Identifying a 905(b) claim requires looking beyond the immediate cause of an injury to ask who actually controlled the conditions that led to it. A crane malfunction might trace back to a maintenance contractor rather than the equipment’s owner; a slippery deck might be the fault of a different company’s spill rather than your own employer’s housekeeping. That kind of layered investigation is standard practice for us, and it’s often what other firms miss.

These injuries most often happen exactly where the name suggests: on marine terminals and inside shipyards. Most people working on these sites are subcontractors, not direct employees of the terminal or shipyard owner, which is part of why third-party claims come up so often. Common causes include cargo-handling equipment failures, negligent crane or forklift operation, unsafe conditions left behind by another contractor, and careless work by a vessel’s own crew while it’s tied up or in dry dock.

We also see claims arising from a vessel’s unseaworthiness even when the injured worker is a harbor worker rather than a crew member — if a defective condition aboard a ship injures a longshoreman loading or unloading cargo, that can support a negligence claim against the vessel owner. Untangling exactly which company controlled which piece of the work at the time of the injury is often the key to identifying every available claim.

A large share of this work involves claims against the government, since so much of the shipbuilding and terminal work in this region touches government-owned vessels and facilities. These cases are genuinely harder — the rules for suing the government are different, the process is more technical, and many attorneys simply don’t take them on because they don’t know how. That’s exactly the kind of case we built this practice to handle.

Claims against the federal government generally proceed under a different statute than a typical third-party claim, with its own notice requirements, procedural rules, and, in some cases, damage limitations. Missing a procedural step in a government claim can end it before it ever gets a real hearing, which is why experience with these specific cases — not just maritime law generally — matters so much in this part of our practice.

Because most people on shipyards and marine terminals work for subcontractors rather than the terminal or shipyard owner directly, figuring out who’s actually responsible for a given hazard often requires untangling a web of contracts and subcontracts. A single incident might involve a staffing agency that placed the worker, a subcontractor responsible for the specific task, and the terminal or shipyard owner who controlled the overall site.

We investigate the full contractual chain to identify every party who bears responsibility for the conditions that caused an injury, because a claim limited to only the most obvious defendant often leaves real compensation on the table. This kind of investigation takes time and specific familiarity with how these worksites actually operate — which is exactly the experience we bring to every third-party shipyard and marine terminal case.

We also routinely coordinate with the injured worker’s own Longshore Act attorney or claims administrator, since a successful third-party recovery can affect how workers’ compensation benefits are calculated going forward. Making sure these two tracks — the workers’ comp claim and the third-party negligence claim — work together correctly, rather than at cross purposes, is an important part of maximizing what an injured worker ultimately receives.

Unlike workers’ compensation benefits, which are generally limited to medical expenses and a portion of lost wages, a third-party negligence claim allows an injured harbor worker to pursue full compensation — including pain and suffering, the full extent of lost earning capacity, and the actual cost of future medical care, none of which the Longshore Act’s workers’ comp system typically covers in full.

That difference is often substantial. We regularly see cases where a worker’s actual losses far exceed what workers’ compensation alone would ever provide, which is exactly why identifying and pursuing every available third-party claim, alongside the underlying workers’ comp benefits, matters so much for an injured worker’s long-term financial security.