Port, Dock & Shipyard Injury Claims

Port, Dock & Shipyard Injury Lawyers for Louisiana Workers

You do not need to know whether your injury falls under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, the Jones Act or Louisiana law before you contact us. That question is our job. What we need from you is where you were working, what you were doing and what happened.

If you are dealing with a medical bill nobody has agreed to pay, a paycheck that stopped, or a supervisor who wants a statement signed before you have seen a doctor of your own, those are exactly the problems a claim review is meant to sort out. Nothing on this page guarantees benefits or a recovery. It explains how these claims are classified and investigated, so you can decide whether to ask for a review of your own accident. To request one, call The Young Firm or send a message through this site with the worksite, the date and a short description of what happened.

Your Work Duties and Exact Accident Location Matter More Than the Worksite Label

Being injured at a place called a "port" or a "shipyard" does not, by itself, make your claim a maritime claim. The law looks at what you did for a living and precisely where you were when you were hurt, and those two questions can produce different answers for two workers standing fifty feet apart.

Status and situs under the LHWCA. The Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act asks two things. The first, usually called status, is whether you were engaged in maritime employment. The statute names longshore workers and harbor workers, including ship repairers, shipbuilders and ship-breakers, and excludes others, most notably the master or a member of the crew of a vessel (33 U.S.C. § 902(3)). The second, called situs, is whether the injury occurred on navigable waters or on an adjoining area such as a pier, wharf, dry dock, terminal, building way or marine railway customarily used for loading, unloading, repairing, dismantling or building vessels (33 U.S.C. § 903(a)). A clerk injured in an office building inside the port fence and a longshore worker injured on the wharf outside that building may land in different places under this analysis. The detailed coverage rules are on our page about workers who may qualify for LHWCA coverage.

Which company actually employed you. Shipyards and terminals routinely run on staffing companies, labor brokers and subcontractors. The company whose name is on your paycheck, the supervisor who gave you your task that morning and the company that controlled how the work was done may be three different entities. Who counts as your legal employer affects which company owes benefits and which companies, if any, can be sued.

Whether you have a real connection to a vessel. A worker who goes aboard a ship for a single repair task does not become a Jones Act seaman by walking up the gangway. At the same time, a deckhand who is hurt on the dock while tying up his own boat does not lose seaman status because his feet were on land at the moment of injury. Courts apply the framework from Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis — duties that contribute to the vessel's function or mission, and a connection to a vessel or fleet in navigation that is substantial in both duration and nature — and the Fifth Circuit's later refinements in Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators of Texas, which look at questions such as whether the worker owes allegiance to the vessel rather than to a shoreside employer and whether the assignment was limited to a discrete task after which the vessel connection ends. Whether the vessel you worked on was under construction, under repair or in service is a fact to investigate, not a switch that decides the case. If your work mixed dock time with regular vessel assignments, read about whether you qualify as a Jones Act seaman.

The practical point: keep track of the facts, not the labels. Your regular duties, your exact position when injured, the names of every company involved and any regular vessel assignment are what change the analysis.

LHWCA, Jones Act or State Law: Possible Paths After a Shoreside Injury

There is no single "port injury claim." Depending on your facts, an injury at a Louisiana dock, terminal or shipyard may point toward one of several frameworks, and sometimes toward more than one. The table below is orientation, not an eligibility test.

Three hypotheticals show how similar accidents split. None describes a real case, and none predicts an outcome.

• Dockside cargo work. A laborer hired through a stevedoring company is struck by a swinging container while working on a wharf at a river terminal. His duties and location fit the LHWCA's description of longshore work on a covered situs, so the first review would be for LHWCA benefits, followed by a separate look at whether the crane operator's company, the vessel or the terminal operator is a distinct entity with its own potential liability.
• Ship repair. A welder employed by a shipyard is burned during hot work in a tank aboard a vessel sitting in dry dock. Ship repairers are named in the LHWCA, so benefits are the starting point. Whether she can also sue the vessel is a different and narrower question. Under 33 U.S.C. § 905(b), if the shipyard that employed her to provide repair services was also the vessel's owner, operator or charterer, the statute bars a vessel-negligence suit against the employer in any capacity. If the vessel belongs to a separate company, a negligence claim against that vessel may remain, subject to the limited duties a vessel owes to shoreside workers.
• A vessel crewmember hurt ashore. A deckhand who spends most of his working time aboard a towboat is injured on the dock while handling lines during a landing. The LHWCA excludes members of a vessel's crew, so the review turns first to seaman status and, if it holds, to the Jones Act, maintenance and cure and unseaworthiness.

Maintenance and cure and unseaworthiness are seaman's remedies. They are not available to every dock or shipyard worker, and no one can tell you they apply before examining your vessel connection. Each is explained in full on Jones Act claims, maintenance and cure claims, unseaworthiness claims and Longshore and Harbor Worker claims.

Start With Where You Were Working and What Happened

You do not need to diagnose your claim. You need to describe your workplace and your accident clearly enough that a lawyer can identify the operations, records and companies involved. The settings below are common in shoreside maritime work.

Shipyards. Shipyard work can involve hot work near flammable residue, entry into tanks and double bottoms, staging and scaffolding at height, temporary access to vessels under construction or repair, and heavy lifts moving over crowded work areas. OSHA's shipyard employment standards (29 CFR Part 1915) address many of these conditions. A violation of a safety standard does not by itself prove a civil claim, but the standards help identify what records exist and who was responsible for the condition. Our page on injuries during shipyard work goes deeper into welding, fall, confined-space and access accidents and the investigation each requires.

Docks, wharves and piers. Dockside accidents can involve wet or deteriorated decking, unguarded edges, gaps between the dock face and a moored vessel, gangways that shift with river stage, or vehicles operating alongside foot traffic, and they can include crush injuries between cargo, vehicles and fixed structures. Our page on dock, wharf and pier injury claims develops these conditions and who typically controls them.

Marine terminals. Container and break-bulk terminals move cargo with top-loaders, reach stackers, forklifts and yard trucks in tight, scheduled cycles. The marine terminal standards (29 CFR Part 1917) and longshoring standards (29 CFR Part 1918) cover much of this activity, though their scopes differ. See marine terminal injuries.

Loading and unloading. Cargo transfer is an activity, not an address. It happens at terminals, at industrial docks, at barge fleets and at shipyard piers, and it often involves a vessel crew, a stevedore and a facility operator at the same time. Because responsibility follows the activity, we treat loading and unloading accidents separately from the facility label.

Cranes and heavy equipment. Crane, rigging and lifting-gear failures cut across all of these settings and can involve equipment owned, leased or maintained by a company other than the worker's employer. Our port and shipyard accident scenarios page walks through crane and equipment incidents in detail.

One caution applies to all of these: a hazard or an injury, by itself, establishes neither fault nor a particular remedy. The type of accident tells us where to look. It does not tell us the answer.

Several Companies May Be on Site—But Not Every Company Can Be Sued

A shipyard accident may involve the yard, a labor contractor that supplied the worker, a subcontractor doing adjacent work, the vessel's owner, a crane rental company and the manufacturer of a piece of gear. A review has to sort those companies into legal roles before anyone can say who is a realistic defendant.

• The employer. Under the LHWCA, an employer that secures compensation is generally immune from a negligence suit by its employee (33 U.S.C. § 905(a)). Benefits are the remedy against the employer, not a lawsuit. Under the Jones Act, by contrast, the seaman's remedy is a negligence suit against the employer.
• The borrowing employer. If a staffing company paid you but a shipyard or terminal directed your work day to day, the yard or terminal may be treated as your borrowing employer. The Fifth Circuit applies a multi-factor test to that question. A company found to be your borrowing employer typically shares the employer's immunity, which can close a lawsuit you assumed was available. That is why we ask who hired you, who could fire you, whose tools you used and who told you what to do each shift.
• The vessel. The LHWCA preserves a negligence claim against a vessel, and in some situations that includes a vessel owned by the employer acting in a separate capacity (33 U.S.C. § 905(b)). The vessel's duties to longshore workers are limited and specific, and the statute contains two restrictions that matter here. First, if you were employed to provide shipbuilding, repair or breaking services and your employer was also the vessel's owner, owner pro hac vice, agent, operator or charterer, the vessel-negligence action is barred against your employer in any capacity, including as vessel owner. Second, if you were employed by the vessel to provide stevedoring services, no action is permitted where the injury was caused by the negligence of persons engaged in providing stevedoring services to the vessel. These restrictions can be decisive for shipyard employees in particular. See Section 905(b) vessel claims.
• The site operator, other contractors and equipment companies. A terminal operator, dock owner, adjacent subcontractor or crane company that is a genuinely separate entity and that owed you a duty may be liable for its own negligence. Ownership of the property or presence at the scene is not enough; the question is whether that company controlled the condition or activity that hurt you and whether it is shielded by any of the rules above. Our pages on potential third-party maritime claims, contractor and premises negligence and maritime product and equipment liability cover these questions.

Benefits and third-party claims run on separate tracks, and the statute ties them together. Under 33 U.S.C. § 933, a compensation recipient may pursue a third party, but the employer or carrier has reimbursement rights out of any recovery, and settling a third-party claim without the required written approval can forfeit future compensation. These are reasons to have one lawyer coordinating both tracks rather than treating them as unrelated.

Medical Bills and Missed Pay Depend on the Claim Framework

The most pressing question after an injury is usually not about statutes. It is "who is paying for this, and for how long?"

If your claim is under the LHWCA, the employer or its carrier is responsible for reasonable and necessary medical treatment for the injury and for disability compensation tied to your wage loss and, for certain injuries, to a statutory schedule. The Department of Labor's Office of Workers' Compensation Programs oversees the system. What the LHWCA does not provide is compensation for pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life or other general damages. Those exist only in a viable lawsuit — against a negligent vessel or third party for an LHWCA worker, or against the employer under the Jones Act for a seaman. Details on benefit categories are on LHWCA benefits and compensation; damages available to seamen are on Jones Act compensation and damages.

Disputes over coverage arise in shoreside cases precisely because status and situs can be argued. While an employer's carrier and a state compensation insurer point at each other, treatment can stall. No lawyer can promise to make authorization appear overnight, but identifying the correct framework and the correct responsible party is where unsticking it begins.

Two warnings before you sign anything:

1. Settling one claim can affect another. Compromising a third-party claim without the approvals 33 U.S.C. § 933 requires can cost you future LHWCA compensation. Accepting benefits under one system can also bear on what is available under another. There is no automatic double recovery. Read about third-party claims alongside maritime benefits before you accept a release.
2. Work restrictions are evidence. A light-duty offer, a doctor's restriction and your actual post-injury earnings all feed into disability compensation and, in a lawsuit, into lost earning capacity. Keep them.

After a Port or Shipyard Accident: Get Care, Report Accurately and Preserve Records

None of the following requires you to break a rule, enter a restricted area, take company property or delay treatment. If you have already done none of it, that does not prevent a consultation. Missing photographs and lost witness names are common; they are a reason to start the investigation sooner, not a reason to stay home.

First priorities

1. Get medical care, and tell every provider that the injury happened at work, how it happened and what parts of your body hurt. If an emergency record omits an injured body part, expect that omission to be raised against you later.
2. Report the injury to your employer promptly and accurately. Describe what happened in plain terms. Do not guess at causes you did not observe, and do not minimize symptoms to keep working.
3. Ask for a copy of any incident report you sign, and read it before you sign it. If it is wrong, say so.

Information you can write down today

• Date and time of the accident, and the exact spot: which yard, which dock, which berth, which vessel, which deck or hold.
• The task you were assigned and who assigned it.
• Every company you know of on the job: your payroll employer, the site owner or operator, the vessel's name and owner if a vessel was involved, and any contractor whose people or equipment were nearby.
• Supervisor names and the names and phone numbers of coworkers who saw the accident or the condition.
• Identifiers for any equipment involved: crane number, forklift number, gangway or scaffold location, tool markings.

Records you may lawfully keep

• Your own copies of incident reports, medical records and bills.
• Texts and emails about the accident, your injury, your work status or your pay.
• Pay stubs, W-2s, dispatch or hiring-hall records showing your hours and earnings.
• Photographs you already took or that coworkers are willing to share with you.

Records counsel may need to request or preserve

• Facility surveillance and gate-camera footage, which is routinely overwritten on a rolling basis.
• Equipment inspection, certification and maintenance records.
• Lift plans, hot-work permits, confined-space entry permits and job safety analyses.
• Shift assignments, staffing-agency contracts and vessel logs.
• The employer's internal investigation and any OSHA or Coast Guard involvement.

Cargo is moved, damaged equipment is repaired or scrapped and footage is overwritten in the normal course of business. That is why preservation requests often need to go out early, and why it helps to have identified the responsible companies before the evidence disappears.

On recorded statements: you should comply with lawful reporting duties to your employer. Whether to give a recorded statement to an insurance adjuster, sign a broad medical authorization or accept a release are separate decisions, and they deserve individual advice before you make them. Our pages on shipyard work injuries, loading and unloading accidents and port and shipyard accident scenarios describe which records matter most for particular kinds of accidents.

Reporting the Accident Is Not the Same as Filing a Claim

Telling your supervisor you were hurt is important, but it does not necessarily satisfy a statute's notice requirement, it does not file a compensation claim, and it does not start a lawsuit.

Under the LHWCA, notice of injury (33 U.S.C. § 912) and the filing of a claim (33 U.S.C. § 913) are separate steps with separate time limits and their own form and content requirements. The filing period can be measured differently when compensation has been paid voluntarily and then stopped, and occupational illnesses that surface long after exposure are treated differently again. The Jones Act and general maritime law carry their own limitation periods, and claims involving government-owned facilities or vessels can trigger special notice rules. There is no single "maritime deadline," and we will not publish one here because a number pulled out of context is how workers lose claims. The details live on LHWCA notice and filing deadlines and Jones Act deadlines.

What we need to evaluate timing: the date of injury, the date you first reported it and to whom, the dates and amounts of any benefit payments you have received, and — for gradual or delayed conditions — when you first connected your symptoms to your work.

Contacting a law firm, including submitting a form on this website, does not itself preserve any deadline. What protects a deadline depends on the framework: under the LHWCA, timely written notice and a properly filed claim; for a negligence lawsuit, a suit filed within the applicable limitation period. Exceptions and tolling rules exist, but they depend on facts a lawyer has to examine.

If you believe you may already be late, do not assume the claim is gone. Get advice promptly rather than deciding the question yourself.

What a Lawyer Needs to Reconstruct a Multi-Company Workplace Accident

An employer's incident report answers the employer's questions: what happened, who was involved, whether a rule was broken. It is often written within hours, by someone whose company may be the one facing a claim, and it may not address the questions that decide legal responsibility:

• Who controlled the task? Not who signed the paycheck, but who planned the lift, chose the access route, issued the permit or decided the ship would be worked in that sequence. Shift assignments, job orders and the contract between a staffing company and the yard or terminal answer this.
• Who controlled the equipment? A crane on a shipyard pier may be owned by the yard, leased from a rental company, operated by a subcontractor's employee and rigged by yet another crew. Inspection and maintenance records, operator certifications and the rental agreement sort that out.
• What was the vessel's role? If a vessel was involved, its ownership, its charter arrangements, whether it was in navigation or under construction, and what the crew did or knew about the hazard all matter, both for seaman-status questions and for any § 905(b) analysis.
• Where, exactly, were you? Situs can turn on feet, and a photograph of the spot with reference points is worth more than a paragraph of description.
• Who else saw it? Coworkers change jobs, and contractors leave the site when the job ends. Witness contact information degrades quickly.

Putting the company roles, the equipment history and the exact location together is what shows which framework applies and which entities carried a duty. Sometimes that confirms the incident report. Sometimes it reveals a borrowing-employer relationship, an unmentioned contractor or a maintenance gap the report never addressed. Our page on contractor and premises negligence describes how those findings translate into claims against legally distinct companies.

New Orleans Counsel for Louisiana and Gulf Coast Workplace Injuries

The Young Firm is based in New Orleans and represents injured maritime workers across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. That includes shoreside workers: shipyard employees along the river and the coastal bayous, longshore and terminal workers at the facilities that line the Mississippi River through the Port of New Orleans and beyond, and dock workers at industrial and fleeting facilities from the river parishes to the coast.

Two points of clarity about geography. First, the Port of New Orleans, like other port authorities, is a public entity that owns and leases facilities; it is not necessarily the employer of the people working on its wharves, and it is not automatically responsible for an accident at a leased terminal. The operator, the stevedore and the vessel are usually the parties whose roles matter. Second, the law that governs your claim follows your duties, your worksite and your employer relationships, not your home address or ours. A New Orleans lawyer can review an injury at a yard in the Houma or Morgan City area or a terminal upriver; what has to be confirmed for your matter is that the firm can take it on and that the facts support the frameworks discussed here.

If travel is difficult because of your injury, mention it when you make contact so the review can be arranged around it.

This page covers shoreside work. If you were hurt on a rig, platform or offshore vessel, start with offshore injury claims. If you were a crewmember on a barge, tugboat or towboat, start with barge and tugboat injury claims. If your work mixed dock time and vessel time, this page and those pages both apply, and the seaman-status discussion above is where the analysis begins.

What to Share During Your Initial Workplace Injury Review

You can contact The Young Firm before you have gathered a single document. The initial review starts with your account.

What helps most at the start

• The worksite: the yard, dock, terminal or facility, and the vessel if one was involved.
• The date of the accident and the date you reported it.
• The task you were doing and who assigned it.
• The companies involved, as best you know them: your employer, the site operator, contractors, vessel owner.
• Your injury, your current treatment and who is or is not paying for it.
• Any deadline, statement, release or settlement offer you are worried about.

From there, the review turns to which frameworks may apply, what records need to be preserved and what the next steps are. Documents — treatment records, wage history, work-restriction notes, incident reports and every letter, email or form from an employer, carrier or adjuster — are useful and will be requested, but they are not a prerequisite for the first conversation. If a release or settlement has been proposed, keep it unsigned. When documents contain medical or financial information, ask how to send them rather than attaching them to a general web form.

On fees and consultation terms. Ask about them before any engagement, and expect a direct answer specific to your situation. Fee rules differ by claim type: attorney fees in LHWCA compensation matters are governed by 33 U.S.C. § 928 and are subject to approval requirements that do not apply to a negligence lawsuit. For that reason no single fee promise fits every kind of claim discussed on this page.

On what an inquiry does and does not do. Contacting the firm does not by itself create an attorney-client relationship, and it does not preserve a deadline. An attorney-client relationship is formed by agreement between you and the firm, not by a call or a form. Until then, keep reporting and treating as you normally would.

For a full description of how the firm handles benefits-side representation, see Longshore and Harbor Worker claims.

Can I Contact the Firm for an Injured or Deceased Family Member?

You can. If your husband, wife, parent or child is hospitalized after a shipyard, dock or terminal accident and cannot make the call, you can contact the firm and describe what you know. Where the worker was, what he or she was doing, who the employer is and what the doctors are saying is enough to begin.

Two things need to be understood early. Making an inquiry is different from having legal authority to direct a claim or accept a settlement on someone else's behalf. Whether you can act for an injured adult depends on documents such as a power of attorney or a court appointment, and a lawyer should explain what is needed before anyone signs anything. Second, the available claims and, in a fatal case, the family members who are entitled to recover are determined by the applicable law, not by who makes the first call.

If your family member died as a result of a workplace accident at a port, dock or shipyard, the frameworks discussed on this page have counterparts for death claims, with their own beneficiary rules and deadlines. Start with help after a fatal maritime workplace accident, or contact the firm directly.

Legal Sources Referenced in This Guide

This page is general legal information prepared for The Young Firm. It describes how port, dock and shipyard injury claims are classified and investigated; it is not an assessment of your case, and reading it does not make you a client. The qualifications inside each section are part of the answer, not boilerplate.

The legal statements above refer to the following authorities:

Federal statutes

• 33 U.S.C. § 902 (LHWCA definitions, including the maritime-employment status requirement and the exclusion of masters and crew members)
• 33 U.S.C. § 903 (LHWCA coverage, including the situs requirement)
• 33 U.S.C. § 905 (exclusiveness of employer liability; vessel negligence claims; shipbuilding, repair, breaking and stevedoring restrictions)
• 33 U.S.C. § 912 (notice of injury or death)
• 33 U.S.C. § 913 (filing of claims)
• 33 U.S.C. § 928 (attorney fees in LHWCA matters)
• 33 U.S.C. § 933 (third-party liability, reimbursement and settlement approval)
• 46 U.S.C. § 30104 (the Jones Act)

Case law referenced for seaman-status principles

• Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, 515 U.S. 347 (1995)
• Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators of Texas, L.L.C., 997 F.3d 564 (5th Cir. 2021) (en banc)

Federal agency guidance

• U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Workers' Compensation Programs, Division of Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation — coverage, benefits and claims guidance

Workplace safety regulations (context for hazards; a violation does not by itself establish civil liability)

• 29 CFR Part 1915 (Shipyard Employment)
• 29 CFR Part 1917 (Marine Terminals)
• 29 CFR Part 1918 (Longshoring)

Statements about The Young Firm's location and the scope of workers it represents reflect the firm's own positioning. Statements about Louisiana workers' compensation and its interaction with federal remedies are deliberately general and require current review against Louisiana statutes and case law for any individual matter. Law and firm practices change; when they do, the affected sections of this page should be revised rather than left standing.

Tell The Young Firm Where You Worked and How You Were Hurt

If you were injured at a shipyard, dock, wharf, pier or marine terminal in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast, call The Young Firm or send a message through this site and start with five things: where you were working, the date, what you were doing, who employed you and what you are most worried about right now — treatment that has not been approved, wages that have stopped, a statement someone wants you to sign.

You do not need to know whether your claim belongs under the LHWCA, the Jones Act or Louisiana law. You do not need every record in hand. The purpose of the review is to evaluate the potential claim paths your facts support, identify the evidence that needs to be preserved before it is lost, and lay out the next steps in plain terms, without promises about outcomes and without assuming that your inquiry has protected any deadline. Reaching out is how that process begins.