Notable Case Results
Selected results:
Confidential recoveries for each of the 9 crew members Brian represented, in the case that helped make armed security teams standard on vessels in high-risk waters.
Obtained for a relief captain in a Jones Act negligence case involving the failure to provide prompt and adequate medical care. One of the largest single-injury maritime results in the country.
Obtained in a distracted driving case, one of the largest results of its kind in the United States, with his law partner Vuk Vujasinovic as co-lead counsel.
Secured in under six months for a logger who suffered a catastrophic head injury.
Brian represented an American ship captain who was kidnapped by armed pirates off the coast of Nigeria and held for eighteen days after his warnings about specific threats went unheeded. The case drew coverage from CNN, NBC, and international media, resolving on terms favorable to Captain Thomas.
Publications
Brian’s published work spans federal jurisdiction, appellate practice, and maritime law:
- Texas Law Review: Pushing the Limits of the Judicial Power: Tolling State Statutes of Limitation Under 28 U.S.C. 1367(d), 77 Tex. L. Rev. 1049 (1999) — cited as authority more than 24 times, including by the United States government in a brief filed with the United States Supreme Court.
- South Texas Law Review: Published articles on appellate advocacy and the architecture of Texas appellate practice.
- Texas Lawyer: Published analysis on the Limitation of Liability Act, the federal statute that lets vessel owners attempt to cap their liability at the value of the ship.
- Jones Act & General Maritime Law: Numerous published articles on the Jones Act and general maritime law.
- Maritime Injury Guides & Books: Author of 9 books on law and legal strategy, including How to Win Your Injury Case, Insider’s Guide to Winning Your Maritime Injury Case, and Blackballed: How to Protect Yourself If Your Maritime Employer is Retaliating Against You.
Hiring Brian Beckcom
Brian receives hundreds of requests for representation every year. He accepts a small number of them. The cases he takes share three things: a serious or fatal injury, a defendant with something real to answer for, and a family that wants the lawyer they hired to be the one who actually handles the case.
He handles all major personal injury and wrongful death cases: maritime and offshore injuries, trucking and transportation collisions, industrial explosions and accidents, oil field injuries, and catastrophic injuries of every kind, in federal and state courts across the country. Maritime law is his deepest specialty. He handles Jones Act negligence, maintenance and cure, and unseaworthiness claims, the body of law he studied under Professor David W. Robertson and has practiced his entire career.
Every case Brian accepts is prepared for trial from the day it arrives, and every case is led by a Board Certified partner from intake through resolution. Cases resolve because the other side believes the case is going to verdict.
Not sure your case qualifies? Call anyway. The review costs nothing, and if it is not a case for Brian, he will tell you quickly and point you to the right lawyer.
Background
On April 8, 2009, four armed pirates boarded the MV Maersk Alabama in the Indian Ocean. It was the first successful pirate seizure of an American-flagged ship in nearly two hundred years.
Hollywood turned the story into Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. In the movie, the captain is the hero and the crew are background characters. The crew remembers it differently. They fought the pirates with fire hoses, evasive maneuvers, and their bare hands. They captured one of the attackers. Then they went home, changed forever, to an employer that denied any responsibility for sending them into those waters unprotected.
Brian Beckcom represented 9 of the crew. The litigation ran simultaneously in federal and state courts across three states, against one of the largest shipping interests in the world, and touched some of the most sensitive security protocols in the international maritime industry. It ended in a confidential recovery for each crew member Brian represented. It also left a mark on the industry itself: armed security teams are now standard on vessels transiting pirate-prone waters, in part because of the legal pressure this litigation created.
Brian takes cases other lawyers cannot handle, against opponents other lawyers will not fight, for working people whose stories powerful institutions would prefer to rewrite.
For clients who choose real trial lawyers over mass market advertisers.
Trained by the Scholars Who Wrote the Law
At the University of Texas School of Law, Brian graduated with honors and served as Chief Notes Editor of the Texas Law Review. He studied admiralty and maritime law under Professor David W. Robertson, who held the W. Page Keeton Chair in Tort Law and whose name now marks the university’s premier annual admiralty and maritime law conference. He served as a research assistant to Professor Charles Alan Wright, principal author of Federal Practice and Procedure, the treatise that judges at every level of the federal judiciary, including the United States Supreme Court, cite as authoritative.
While still a student, Brian published a Texas Law Review article on federal supplemental jurisdiction. That article has been cited as authority more than 24 times, including by the United States government in a brief filed with the United States Supreme Court. Law review notes do not ordinarily get cited by the Solicitor General’s office. His did.
Computer Science in the Courtroom
Brian spent five years at Texas A&M University studying computer science and philosophy, earned degrees in both, and has kept studying the field ever since. In the early 1990s, when artificial intelligence lived in university laboratories and academic journals, he was learning its foundations: machine learning, neural networks, database design, forensic computing.
Thirty years later, that training decides cases. Modern injury litigation is digital. The truth about a trucking collision lives in electronic logging devices, engine control modules, telematics, and dashcam data. The truth about an offshore injury lives in vessel maintenance records, crewing decisions, and email chains. Brian approaches that evidence the way an engineer approaches a system: find where it failed, then prove why. He uses AI tools in discovery and case preparation not because they are fashionable, but because he has understood the technology at a foundational level since before most lawyers had email.
He Learned the Defense Playbook First
Brian began his career at Fulbright & Jaworski in Houston, at the time one of the largest law firms in the world, working on the side of major corporations in high-stakes litigation.
“Fulbright was a great place to start,” Brian says. “I learned what the other side does and how they think. More importantly, I learned very quickly that I had zero interest in representing massive corporations against people who had been seriously hurt. I like people. I like families. When I left Fulbright, I never looked back.”
He co-founded VB Attorneys with Vuk Vujasinovic, and the two built the firm on a simple premise: take fewer cases, prepare every one of them for trial, and let the results speak.
The Rest of the Story
Brian is a sixth-generation Texan and a military brat. His father, a decorated Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force, flew two hundred combat missions in Vietnam, and Brian grew up on bases from Louisiana to New York to Kansas to Guam. Moving every few years, he says, taught him that people everywhere want the same things: dignity, safety for their families, and fair treatment. That is all his clients want, too.
He lost his mother when he was ten years old. He does not forget what grief looks like, or what it does to a family. His clients are not files. They are people.
At Texas A&M, Brian was a varsity basketball letterman. Ask him about it and he will tell you about the time Robert Horry, who went on to win seven NBA championships, dunked on him. He served four years in the Corps of Cadets and was a member of the Ross Volunteers. Five Beckcom men have completed four years in the Corps across the generations, including two of Brian’s sons.
Brian has been married to Cara Beckcom since 2000. They have three children: Gus, Henry, and Addison. He spent twenty years coaching his kids’ youth sports teams. He holds a purple belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and plays to a single-digit golf handicap. He hosts the Lessons from Leaders podcast, where he interviews combat veterans, championship athletes, judges, and philosophers about leadership and high-stakes decision-making.
