Maritime & Admiralty
The law of the water is not the law of the land.Jones Act · 46 U.S.C. § 30104 · LHWCA · 33 U.S.C. § 901 et seq.
If you were hurt on a vessel, on a dock, or on a platform, your claim probably is not a Louisiana or Mississippi injury case at all. It is a federal maritime case — a separate body of law, with its own remedies, its own defenses, and its own deadlines. Aertker Legal represents seamen, longshore and harbor workers, offshore workers, and boating-injury clients across Louisiana and Mississippi.
Maritime law is its own country. You want counsel who reads the language.
Louisiana and Mississippi sit at the center of the American maritime economy — the river, the Intracoastal, the Gulf, the yards and docks and fabrication facilities that feed them. So a great many injury cases here are not ordinary injury cases. They arise under a federal system that predates both states, and it does not follow the rules a Louisiana tort lawyer uses every day.
The differences are not cosmetic. Whether you are a seaman or a longshore worker decides which law governs your claim — and the two categories are mutually exclusive. Whether the vessel was unseaworthy is a question entirely separate from whether anyone was negligent. Whether you file in state or federal court is a strategic choice with real consequences. And a maritime employer may respond to a serious injury by asking a federal court to limit its liability to the value of the vessel — a move with a clock attached that has no counterpart in ordinary tort practice.
Background. Stephen “Curt” Aertker, Jr. earned his Juris Doctor cum laude from Tulane University School of Law in 1997, together with the school’s Certificate in Maritime Law. He is licensed in Louisiana and Mississippi and admitted in the United States District Courts for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Louisiana and the Northern and Southern Districts of Mississippi, and in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — the court whose maritime decisions govern this coast.
And you work directly with Stephen. Your calls are returned, you always know where your case stands, and the lawyer who prepared the file is the one standing up in court. Your lawyer — not a case number.
From the deck plate to the Fifth Circuit.
Aertker Legal handles maritime injury matters throughout Louisiana and Mississippi — on the rivers and the Intracoastal, in the yards and terminals, on the Lake and the Gulf, and offshore on the Outer Continental Shelf.
Jones Act Seaman Claims
A seaman does not get workers’ compensation. A seaman gets a jury.46 U.S.C. § 30104
The Jones Act gives a seaman injured in the course of employment the right to sue the employer for negligence — with a trial by jury. That alone sets it apart from the workers’ compensation systems that cover most injured workers in both states, where there is no jury and no recovery for pain and suffering.
Two features of the Jones Act are widely misunderstood, including by lawyers:
- Causation is unusually forgiving. The employer’s negligence need only have played any part, even the slightest, in producing the injury. That is a materially lower bar than ordinary tort causation.
- The standard of care is not. A lower causation bar does not mean a lower negligence bar. The employer is held to ordinary prudence under the circumstances — and so is the seaman. A seaman’s own carelessness can still reduce a recovery.
The threshold question is whether you are a seaman at all — and it is the single most contested issue in this practice. It turns on a connection to a vessel in navigation that is substantial in both duration and nature. A rule of thumb treats roughly 30% of work time in the service of a vessel as the general dividing line, but it is a guideline rather than a bright line, and recent Fifth Circuit decisions have tightened it considerably for workers whose assignments are short, task-specific, or essentially land-based — yard workers and shore-based tradesmen sent aboard for discrete jobs now face a harder path. Getting this question right at the outset determines which body of law your case lives under.
Note for aquaculture workers: federal law changed in 2022.Injuries on or after December 23, 2022
Congress amended the Jones Act to exclude aquaculture workers from the definition of “seaman” for injuries occurring on or after December 23, 2022, and made a parallel change to the longshore statute. Workers in that industry who were told years ago what their rights were may be working from law that no longer applies to them.
Unseaworthiness
A separate claim, against a separate party, on a separate theory.General maritime law
A seaman’s Jones Act claim runs against the employer for negligence. The unseaworthiness claim runs against the vessel owner, and it does not depend on negligence at all. The owner’s duty to furnish a seaworthy vessel is absolute and non-delegable, and it is completely independent of the duty to exercise reasonable care.
That means the owner can be liable even where it did nothing careless and had no notice of the problem. What matters is the condition of the ship. The standard is not perfection — the vessel, its gear, and its crew must be reasonably fit for their intended purpose, not accident-free.
Unseaworthiness commonly arises from defective equipment, inadequate or improper gear for the job, an insufficient or improperly trained crew, unsafe methods of work, and hazards left in the way of the crew.
An important limit, honestly stated: the Supreme Court held in 2019 that punitive damages are not available on an unseaworthiness claim, and the Fifth Circuit reached the same conclusion for Jones Act claims. Any lawyer suggesting otherwise for a seaman’s injury claim in this circuit is describing law that does not exist here.
Maintenance & Cure
It is owed whether or not anyone was at fault. It is also the one most often shortchanged.General maritime law · one of the oldest duties in the law
Maintenance and cure is a seaman’s no-fault right, owed by the employer when a seaman falls ill or is injured in the service of the vessel — regardless of who caused it, and regardless of whether anyone caused it. It has nothing to do with negligence.
- Maintenance — a daily allowance for food and lodging ashore while you recover
- Cure — payment of medical expenses reasonably necessary to treat the condition
- Both are owed until you reach maximum medical improvement — the point at which your condition is not expected to improve further
In practice this is where injured seamen are most often quietly underpaid: a maintenance rate set at a token daily figure with no relationship to what housing and food actually cost, or cure cut off long before maximum medical improvement on the strength of a one-visit opinion from a doctor the company chose.
That matters, because of an asymmetry worth knowing: while punitive damages are unavailable for unseaworthiness, the Supreme Court has held that punitive damages remain available where an employer willfully and wantonly denies maintenance and cure — and attorney’s fees may be recovered where the refusal is callous or arbitrary. An employer that stops your payments to pressure a settlement is taking a real risk, and it is worth making sure it knows that.
Longshore & Harbor Workers (LHWCA)
Not a seaman. Not on state comp either.33 U.S.C. § 901 et seq.
Dockworkers, ship repairers, shipbuilders, ship-breakers, and other harbor workers fall under a federal compensation statute rather than the Louisiana or Mississippi workers’ compensation systems. Coverage turns on two requirements that must both be met — situs (where you were hurt: navigable waters, or an adjoining pier, wharf, dry dock, terminal, or other area customarily used for loading, unloading, repairing, or building a vessel) and status (whether your work was maritime employment). Masters and crew members are expressly excluded, which is the seam where the Jones Act begins.
The claim most often left on the table is the third-party one. LHWCA benefits are the exclusive remedy against your employer, but § 905(b) preserves a separate negligence action against the vessel — a genuine tort claim, with damages the compensation system does not pay. Where the vessel is someone other than your employer, that action is frequently the most valuable part of the case, and it is routinely missed.
Curt recovered in excess of $1,000,000 for a Slidell client whose leg was traumatically amputated in a fabrication-yard accident caused by a crane operator’s negligence on a barge, prosecuted as a § 905(b) action under the LHWCA.
Results may vary. Every case is different, and prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any other matter.
Two traps specific to this statute — both of which can destroy an otherwise sound claim, and neither of which is obvious:
- Settling with a third party without your employer’s written approval can terminate your right to further compensation and medical benefits entirely.
- Accepting compensation under a formal award can assign your third-party claim to the employer if you do not file suit within six months of that acceptance. Voluntary payments made without an award do not trigger it — a distinction that decides cases.
Offshore & the Outer Continental Shelf
The platform is not a vessel. That single fact reroutes the whole case.OCSLA · 43 U.S.C. § 1333
Offshore injuries are where the categories collide, and where the wrong assumption is most expensive. A worker on a fixed platform is generally not a seaman, because a fixed platform is not a vessel in navigation — while a worker on a jack-up rig, a semi-submersible, a drillship, or a crew boat may well be. The same company, the same field, the same job title, and a completely different body of law.
The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act supplies the framework, and it does two things that matter to an injured worker:
- It extends LHWCA coverage to workers injured in operations on the Outer Continental Shelf
- It adopts the law of the adjacent state — often Louisiana — as surrogate federal law where it is applicable and not inconsistent with federal law
The firm handles injuries on platforms, jack-up and semi-submersible rigs, drillships, crew and supply boats, tugs, towboats, barges, and in the fabrication yards that serve them — and treats the status question as the first order of business rather than an afterthought, because everything downstream depends on it.
Recreational Boating & Passenger Injuries
You do not have to be working to be in admiralty.Lake Pontchartrain · the Tchefuncte · the Gulf
People are often surprised that federal maritime law reaches a Saturday on the Lake. It does. Admiralty jurisdiction does not require commercial activity — a collision between pleasure boats on navigable water can be a maritime case, and so can a fire at a marina. Jurisdiction turns on where the incident happened and whether that kind of incident bears a substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity and could disrupt maritime commerce.
For families on the Northshore this is not academic. Lake Pontchartrain, the Tchefuncte, the Bogue Falaya, the Tangipahoa, the Rigolets, the Intracoastal, and the Mississippi Sound are navigable waters. A serious boating injury there may be governed by federal maritime law rather than Louisiana or Mississippi tort law — which changes the available remedies, the defenses, and the deadlines.
The move that catches families off guard: a boat owner facing a serious claim can petition a federal court to limit its liability to the value of the vessel and its freight — a doctrine old enough to have been written for wooden ships and still very much alive. If it succeeds, recovery for a catastrophic injury can be capped at the value of the boat. The owner must file that action within six months of receiving written notice of a claim, which means the first written demand can start a clock that most families never knew existed.
The firm also handles passenger injuries aboard commercial and charter vessels, where a ticket often contains contractual terms that shorten deadlines and dictate where suit must be filed. Read the ticket before you assume you have time.
Maritime clocks are short, and there is more than one running.
Maritime law does not run on a single deadline, and the one that governs your case depends on what kind of claim it is and who you were working for. Some of the shortest clocks belong to the claims people assume are the safest. The figures below are general — they carry exceptions, and the exceptions carry exceptions. Treat them as a reason to call, not as legal advice you can rely on.
- Maritime personal injury or death — generally three years from when the claim arose 46 U.S.C. § 30106
- Longshore (LHWCA) notice of injury — generally 30 days; one year for occupational disease 33 U.S.C. § 912
- Longshore (LHWCA) claim for compensation — generally one year; two years for occupational disease 33 U.S.C. § 913
- Occupational hearing loss — the clock does not start until you receive an audiogram with its report 33 U.S.C. § 908(c)(13)(D)
- Third-party claim after a formal LHWCA award — six months from acceptance, or the claim may pass to your employer 33 U.S.C. § 933(b)
- A vessel owner’s limitation action — six months from written notice of a claim 46 U.S.C. § 30529
- Maintenance and cure — governed by different principles than the three-year rule above, and analyzed case by case
Contracts can shorten these. Tickets, employment agreements, and charter terms routinely do. If you are anywhere near one of these dates, the right move is a phone call today, not research tonight.
No fee unless you recover.
Maritime injury cases are handled on a contingency fee — there is no upfront attorney fee, and the firm is paid a percentage of the recovery only if there is one. If there is no recovery, there is no attorney fee. The fee and the handling of case costs are explained in writing, in plain terms, before the firm is hired. Longshore claims have their own federal fee rules, which are explained the same way.
What injured maritime workers ask first.
Am I a seaman? The honest answer is that it depends on facts, and that it is fought over constantly. It turns on whether your connection to a vessel in navigation is substantial in duration and in nature — not on your job title, and not on what your employer calls you. Roughly 30% of work time in the service of a vessel is a common rule of thumb, but the Fifth Circuit has narrowed the inquiry for short, task-specific, and shore-based assignments. If you are near the line, that question deserves an answer before anything else happens in your case.
The company is paying my bills and giving me a per-diem. Is that my settlement? No. If you are a seaman, maintenance and cure is owed to you no matter who was at fault — it is not a favor, it is not a settlement, and accepting it does not resolve your claim for negligence or unseaworthiness. Those are separate rights.
They want me to sign something. Should I? Not before a lawyer reads it. Post-injury paperwork can contain a release, or an arbitration agreement that moves your case out of court entirely — and the Fifth Circuit has enforced such an agreement against an injured seaman even where he alleged he was pressured into it. The traditional protections courts extend to seamen do not reliably save someone who has already signed. This is the single cheapest mistake to avoid: do not sign, and call.
Do I have to sue in federal court? Usually not. The saving-to-suitors clause preserves a plaintiff’s right to bring most maritime claims in state court, and a Jones Act case filed in state court generally cannot be removed. Where to file is a real strategic decision — jury pool, procedure, and timing all move — and it should be made deliberately.
I was hurt on a platform, not a boat. Does any of this apply? Very likely, yes — but through a different door. Fixed-platform workers are generally not seamen, and instead are typically covered under the longshore statute as extended to the Outer Continental Shelf, often with the law of the adjacent state supplying the rules. The category matters more than the address.
My accident was partly my own fault. Is my case over? No. Maritime law uses comparative fault — your recovery is reduced by your share of the fault, not eliminated. Assumption of the risk is not the bar here that clients often assume it is. Do not talk yourself out of a claim before it has been evaluated.
If a maritime clock is running, it is running right now.
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