Maritime Injury Fees and Costs: What to Understand Before You Sign

If You Are Reading a Fee Agreement: A Lawyer's Fee and the Costs of a Case Are Different

A fee agreement usually deals with two separate kinds of money, and keeping them apart is the first step to reading one.

The attorney fee is the charge for the lawyer's professional work: the time, the skill and the representation itself. It pays for the person handling the claim, not for anything the claim needs from outside.

Case costs, sometimes called litigation expenses, are the out-of-pocket expenses a case requires. Common examples include court filing fees, the charges for obtaining medical records, expert witness fees, deposition costs, court reporter fees and investigation costs. In a maritime case, records can also mean vessel logs, employment and pay records, and incident reports.

A fee agreement typically addresses each category in its own clause: one describing how the fee is figured, another describing who pays costs, when, and from what.

The distinction matters because the two can be treated differently at the end of a case. An agreement might say one thing about the fee if there is no recovery and something quite different about costs. Someone who reads "fee" and assumes it covers everything may later learn that expenses were a separate line.

If you are looking at an agreement now, the two words to find first are usually "fee" and "costs," and the sentences that follow each one. Marking those clauses, and any expense that is hard to place in either category, gives a clear list of points to raise with the attorney before signing.

If a Case Is Lost: How a Contingency Arrangement Works in Maritime Cases

Many personal injury fee agreements use a contingency arrangement. A contingency fee is a fee paid only if there is a recovery, calculated as a percentage of that recovery as the agreement defines it. If there is no recovery, the fee portion depends on what the agreement says for that outcome.

The details are not standard. The percentage varies from one agreement to another. So does the base it is applied to: some agreements apply the percentage to the gross recovery, before costs come out, and others apply it to the net amount left after costs are repaid. The order of those two steps changes the arithmetic, which is why the wording matters more than the percentage alone.

Costs are handled in more than one way, too. Under some agreements, the attorney advances case costs and is repaid from any recovery. Under others, costs are the client's responsibility regardless of outcome. Some agreements combine the two.

What happens to advanced costs if a case does not succeed is a specific question the agreement is meant to answer. For an injured worker who is already short on income, it is one of the most important lines on the page, because it decides whether a loss leaves a bill behind.

Someone comparing agreements, or weighing a single one, may find it useful to read the gross-versus-net wording and the no-recovery clause side by side, and to ask the attorney how each would play out if the case wins and if it loses.

Before Signing a Fee Agreement: Questions Worth Asking

A fee agreement is a contract, and people who are recovering from an injury or managing a loss are entitled to understand a contract before they sign it. Once signed, its terms decide how any recovery is divided and whether anything is owed after a loss, so an unanswered question now can become an unexpected bill later. The questions below tend to make an agreement's terms clear.

• What percentage is the fee, and is it calculated on the gross recovery or after costs are deducted?
• Who advances case costs, and when are they repaid?
• What happens to advanced costs if the case does not succeed, and does the client owe them?
• Is the fee percentage different if the case settles before trial than if it resolves after trial begins?
• Can every line of the agreement be explained before signing?

The first two show how money moves if there is a recovery. The third shows what happens if there is not. The fourth shows whether the terms change as the case moves forward, and the fifth is a way to check that nothing important has been skipped.

A fee agreement is written to answer these questions. If a seaman, a deckhand or a dock worker cannot find the answer to one of them in the written terms, that gap is itself worth noticing.

A longer list of what people ask before choosing a lawyer appears on our page of questions to ask an attorney, and the general idea of what representation involves is explained on our page about maritime injury legal representation. For someone heading into a first conversation, our page on preparing for your first consultation describes what tends to make that meeting useful.

If You Are a Longshore or Harbor Worker: The Fee Rule Under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act

For one kind of maritime claim, federal law sets its own fee rule. The Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (LHWCA) is a federal law that, as the Department of Labor describes it, provides compensation, medical care and vocational rehabilitation for employees disabled by on-the-job injuries on the navigable waters of the United States or in adjoining areas used in loading, unloading, repairing or building a vessel. It covers workers in traditional maritime occupations such as longshore workers, ship-repairers, shipbuilders, ship-breakers and harbor construction workers. More on who it covers is on our page about longshore worker injury.

The statute itself controls fees in these claims. Under 33 U.S.C. § 928(c), "In all cases fees for attorneys representing the claimant shall be approved in the manner herein provided." The same subsection provides that where the obligation to pay an approved fee falls on the claimant, the fee may be made a lien on the compensation due under an award, with the lien and manner of payment fixed in the award approving the fee.

The Department of Labor's Longshore Act FAQ explains how this works in practice. It states that all requests for attorney fees must be submitted to the Office of Workers' Compensation Programs (OWCP, the federal office that oversees the Act), the Office of Administrative Law Judges, or the courts for approval, and that an attorney may not collect a fee unless it is approved by one of them. It states that under the LHWCA, an attorney may not collect a retainer fee (an advance payment) or receive a contingency fee for representing the claimant in that claim. It adds that fees must be reasonable in relation to the prevailing rates in the attorney's local area, the time spent on the case, the attorney's experience, the quality and complexity of the work, and the amount of benefits awarded.

The same FAQ states that if the employer or insurer denied any part of a claim and the worker later obtains greater benefits with an attorney's help, the employer or insurer may be responsible for the attorney's fees and costs; that in some circumstances the worker may be responsible for them; and that if the attorney does not win greater benefits, no fees or costs will be assessed against the employer or insurer.

This rule applies to LHWCA claims only. The Department of Labor's FAQ describes the Jones Act and the LHWCA as mutually exclusive, with crew members of a vessel covered by the Jones Act rather than the LHWCA. Which law applies depends on the facts: where the injury happened, the vessel, the waters and the injured person's status. That question comes before any question about fees, because it decides which fee structure a claim falls under.

For a longshore or harbor worker who has been handed an agreement asking for an advance payment or a percentage, these points are worth raising directly: whether the claim falls under the LHWCA, and how the attorney's fee would be submitted for approval.

What Happens When the Spoken Explanation and the Written Agreement Differ

A spoken explanation of how fees work can be helpful, but it is not what binds anyone. The fee agreement is a contract: it sets out the fee, how costs are handled, and the conditions under which each is owed. If a spoken summary and the written terms differ, the written terms are what the signer has agreed to.

That means a reassuring conversation does not protect against a clause that says something else. Terms also vary: two injured crew members from the same vessel could sign agreements with different cost clauses, so what a coworker or relative was told may not describe the document in front of you.

For someone weighing an agreement while also managing medical appointments and lost wages, this can feel like one more burden. A person has the right to read the agreement fully, take it home if needed, and ask about any term before signing. An unclear term is a reason to ask, not a reason to guess. Some people write down what they were told in conversation, check each point against the written clause, and then ask about any difference.

For LHWCA claims, the agreement is not the last word on its own: as described above, an attorney's fee in that claim must be approved before it can be collected.

When No One Can Quote a Maritime Injury Case's Cost Without the Facts

No general figure describes what a maritime injury case costs, because the costs follow from the case. For someone whose agreement makes them responsible for costs, or whose recovery repays advanced costs, the factors below can shape how much of any recovery remains.

• Disputes. If what happened, who was responsible or which law applies is disputed, more work and more records are usually involved, and costs tend to rise with them.
• Experts. If the case calls for expert opinions, such as on maritime safety, on medicine, or on economics like lost earning capacity, each expert adds to the case costs an agreement may require to be repaid.
• Timing. Whether a case resolves before litigation begins or after it is underway affects total costs, since depositions, transcripts and court filings build up as a case moves forward.
• Records. Medical records, vessel logs, employment records and incident reports all have to be gathered and reviewed. Our page on documents to gather before a review describes the records maritime matters tend to turn on.
• Governing law. Whether an injury falls under the Jones Act, the LHWCA, general maritime law or, in some situations, state law can affect the procedure the claim follows and what that procedure costs. A claim against someone other than the employer, described on our page about third-party claims, can add its own steps.

These variables are why a general estimate is less useful than a conversation grounded in the specific facts. If you would like to talk through how these factors may bear on what happened to you or your family, you can request a case evaluation and raise them directly.