Key Takeaways
Brian Beckcom, Board Certified Personal Injury Trial Lawyer | Lead Counsel, Hubbard v. Weeks Marine
Weeks Marine is now owned by Kiewit Corporation — one of the largest construction companies in the United States. That changes the defense posture and the coverage structure on every claim filed after January 1, 2023.
Project 11 is the largest dredging contract in American history. Hundreds of workers are on the Houston Ship Channel right now, operating 24 hours a day. Accidents on a project of this scale are not rare.
Dredging injury cases are not general maritime law. They require a specific combination of maritime engineering, Army Corps regulatory expertise, and knowledge of how the major dredging contractors' insurance programs are structured.
The Jones Act, unseaworthiness, and maintenance and cure work together. Used correctly — and in combination — they produce outcomes no state workers' compensation system can match.
The first offer from the P&I club adjuster is almost never close to what the case is worth. In Brian's experience, the difference between an early unrepresented settlement and a fully developed, trial-ready case is often a factor of five to ten or more.
By Brian Beckcom — Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law, Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Fourteen-time Texas Super Lawyer. Houston, Texas.
I am the lead lawyer for Najee Hubbard. I cannot tell you the confidential facts of that case. What I can tell you is why cases like this one matter — not just to my client, but to every deckhand, engineer, dredge operator, tug hand, and able-bodied seaman working on the Houston Ship Channel right now.
If you were hurt on a Weeks Marine vessel, on a Kiewit project, on the Houston Ship Channel Project 11 expansion, at a Port of Houston public or private terminal, or anywhere in Galveston Bay — this article is for you. Read it carefully. Then, if you need a lawyer, call someone who has actually tried these cases in federal and state court across the country against the biggest maritime contractors in North America.
That is a very short list. I am on it.
Weeks Marine, Inc. was founded as a family-owned marine contractor in 1919 and for most of its history was headquartered in Cranford, New Jersey. By any honest measure, Weeks is one of the two largest marine, dredging, and tunneling contractors in North America. Their subsidiaries include Healy Tibbitts Builders, McNally International, and North American Aggregates.
On January 1, 2023, Weeks Marine was acquired by Kiewit Corporation. Kiewit is an Omaha, Nebraska construction and engineering firm with more than $12 billion in annual revenue — one of the largest privately held construction companies in the United States. Weeks and its subsidiaries now operate as wholly-owned subsidiaries of Kiewit, retaining their brand names.
Why does that matter to you if you were hurt at work? Two reasons. First, the defense posture changes. Acquisitions bring in new claims counsel, new insurance programs, new risk managers, and sometimes new settlement authority thresholds. A case that would have settled quietly in 2022 under Weeks's old P&I program may now get routed through a corporate risk committee that has no historical relationship with you, your injury, or your captain's assessment of what happened. Second, the financial exposure of the defendant has gone up. Kiewit's balance sheet is orders of magnitude larger than Weeks's standalone books. That does not mean Kiewit writes bigger checks voluntarily. It means the checks a jury can write — and the insurance and reinsurance layers available to pay them — are larger than most plaintiff lawyers understand how to reach.
You need a lawyer who understands both the marine contractor and the parent company. Not a billboard firm.
If you work on the water in Houston, you already know about Project 11. For everyone else: Project 11 is the $1 billion widening and deepening of the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has called the busiest waterway in the United States. Port Houston's public terminals and the more than 200 private facilities along the channel generate roughly $802 billion in annual economic activity and support 2.1 million American jobs.
In June 2022, the Port Commission of the Port of Houston Authority awarded the two largest contracts in its history — totaling $430 million — to Weeks Marine and Curtin Maritime Corporation to complete the remaining Galveston Bay segments of Project 11. The Port Commission chairman called Weeks's share of that award "historic and, to our knowledge, the largest [dredging contract] award ever made."
Weeks's share involves widening 8.3 miles of the Houston Ship Channel and 4 miles of the Bayport Ship Channel, executed primarily with Weeks's 30-inch hydraulic cutter suction dredge, the C.R. McCaskill. The channel is being widened from 530 feet to 700 feet through the Galveston Bay reach — an additional 170 feet across miles of active navigable water.
That is a massive, multi-year, heavy marine construction project. Hundreds of men and women are working on it right now. Cutter dredges, booster pumps, pipelines, crew boats, tugs, hopper barges, survey vessels, and placement area crews are operating 24 hours a day, in shifts, in every kind of weather Galveston Bay throws at them. Accidents on a project of that scale are not rare. They are inevitable.
Hubbard v. Weeks Marine is an active matter. I am the lead lawyer for Najee Hubbard. There is a confidentiality framework around the discovery in the case, and I intend to honor it to the letter.
What I can say publicly is this: the case involves a marine contractor, a vessel-side safety system, and the kind of overhead mechanical component that is supposed to function correctly every single time — and when it doesn't, the consequences for the crew member below it are severe. The claims arise under well-established federal maritime doctrines: Jones Act negligence, unseaworthiness under the general maritime law, and the employer's absolute duty to provide a reasonably safe place to work.
If you are a seaman working on a Weeks Marine vessel — or any marine contractor's vessel, anywhere in the country — the doctrine is already on your side. The question is whether your lawyer understands how to use it.
Most maritime personal injury lawyers in Texas cut their teeth on offshore oilfield cases — jack-up rigs, supply boats, drillships, and the Gulf of Mexico production fleet. Those are important cases, and I have tried many of them. But dredging and channel-expansion cases are a different animal.
A few of the differences that matter:
The vessels are specialized industrial platforms, not transportation assets. A 30-inch hydraulic cutter dredge like the C.R. McCaskill is, functionally, a floating heavy-civil construction machine. The hazards are closer to a demolition site than to a cargo ship. The proof of negligence often requires a combination of maritime engineering, dredging operations expertise, Army Corps technical specifications, and OSHA/USCG regulatory analysis. Most maritime plaintiff lawyers are not comfortable in all four zones.
The defense bar is a small, specialized club. The major dredging contractors — Great Lakes Dredge & Dock, Weeks Marine/Kiewit, Curtin Maritime, Manson Construction — are defended by a tiny handful of admiralty law firms. Those defense lawyers know every plaintiff attorney who has actually tried a dredging case to verdict. They know who bluffs and who doesn't. Your leverage in settlement negotiations depends almost entirely on that reputation.
The coverage layers are complex. Marine builders risk policies, P&I clubs, excess liability towers, subcontractor certificates of insurance, contractual indemnity between the prime contractor and the Army Corps — these are not ordinary commercial insurance issues. Finding the money to pay a serious claim requires knowing how to unwind a contractor's insurance program, which often takes depositions of risk managers, underwriters, and brokers before you see the fourth or fifth layer of coverage.
The seaman-status question is often where the case is won or lost. Whether an injured worker qualifies as a "seaman" under the Jones Act and Chandris v. Latsis drives almost everything that follows — the forum, the jury-trial right, the damages available, the standard of causation. Getting that classification right, early, with a clear-eyed analysis of time spent in service of the vessel, the fleet in navigation, and the substantiality of the connection, is one of the most consequential decisions in the case. Most general personal injury lawyers have never briefed it.
None of that is on a billboard. None of it makes a thirty-second television spot. But it is the work.
If you are a seaman injured on the water in Houston, two powerful bodies of federal maritime law apply to your case. Used correctly — and in combination — they give you leverage that no state workers' compensation system or ordinary negligence lawsuit can match. Used incorrectly, they leave money on the table that you will never get back.
The Jones Act — Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, codified at 46 U.S.C. § 30104 — gives "seamen" the right to sue their employer for negligence and recover full tort damages: medical bills, lost earnings, pain and suffering, mental anguish, disfigurement, and loss of household services. Unlike state workers' compensation, the Jones Act is fault-based. You have to prove employer or crew negligence. But the burden of proof on causation under the Jones Act is famously low — the "featherweight" standard from Rogers v. Missouri Pacific R. Co. — meaning any negligence that "played any part, even the slightest" in causing your injury is enough.
To be a "seaman," you generally have to be permanently assigned to a vessel or fleet and spend a substantial portion of your work time (usually at least 30 percent) in service of the vessel in navigation. Dredge crews, tug crews, crew-boat operators, mates, engineers, and able-bodied seamen usually qualify. The Jones Act also gives you the right to a jury trial — and the right to choose between federal and state court — both of which are enormous strategic advantages your lawyer needs to know how to use.
Separate from the Jones Act, the general maritime law gives injured seamen two additional rights.
Maintenance and cure is a no-fault benefit. Your employer owes you a daily stipend (maintenance) and all reasonable medical expenses (cure) until you reach maximum medical improvement, regardless of whose fault the accident was. If your employer cuts these benefits off prematurely — which happens constantly — you have a separate cause of action for wrongful termination of maintenance and cure, and in cases of bad faith, punitive damages are available under Atlantic Sounding Co. v. Townsend.
Unseaworthiness is a strict-liability claim against the vessel owner. The owner has an absolute, non-delegable duty to provide a vessel that is reasonably fit for its intended purpose — hull, gear, tackle, equipment, appurtenances, and crew. A defective handrail, a non-skid surface that has worn through, an improperly functioning hatch, a cook who is inadequately trained, a deckhand who is not up to the job — all of these can render a vessel unseaworthy and make the owner liable without any proof of negligence at all.
The Jones Act, maintenance and cure, and the unseaworthiness doctrine are stacked for a reason. Used together by a lawyer who understands how they interact, they produce outcomes that ordinary state-law personal injury claims cannot.
I tell every injured worker who calls me the same five things. They apply whether you were hurt on a Weeks Marine dredge, a Kirby Inland Marine towboat, a hopper barge in Galveston Bay, a crew boat running between Bayport and Barbours Cut, a container terminal, or a ship repair yard at the Turning Basin.
Marine contractors like Weeks are almost always insured through a Protection and Indemnity (P&I) Club — maritime mutual insurers like Signal Mutual, Steamship Mutual, the American Club, or the Shipowners' Club — backed by excess liability towers that can reach tens of millions of dollars on a single claim. When Weeks became a Kiewit subsidiary, that coverage structure likely consolidated with Kiewit's enterprise risk program, which adds layers on top.
The first offer the P&I club adjuster makes you is almost never close to what the case is worth. It is the number calculated to close the file before you understand what you actually have. In my experience — and I have been doing this work for more than two decades — the difference between an early, unrepresented settlement and a fully developed, trial-ready case is often a factor of five, ten, or more.
That is not a marketing claim. It is a mathematical reality that the defense bar already knows, which is why the first offer exists.
The Hubbard v. Weeks Marine matter is ongoing, and I will not discuss its confidential facts. The existence of the case, the identity of the parties, and the legal theories are part of the public record.
I name the case here for one reason: specificity. When someone tells you they are an expert in maritime litigation against major dredging contractors, the only honest evidence they can give you is a list of names. Mine includes:
Many of the largest recoveries of my career are confidential and will never appear on any website, anywhere. That is how settlements in serious maritime cases work. Confidentiality is the price of the number.
Call my office directly, and ask specifically for me by name — Brian Beckcom. If the case is one I can help with, I will be your lead lawyer, and your file will be run by a Board Certified trial lawyer from intake through resolution, with the full support of the team behind me.
If you were hurt:
you have rights under the Jones Act and the general maritime law. How to use them depends on the facts. That is what lawyers are for.
Board Certified, Personal Injury Trial Law — Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
Fourteen-time Texas Super Lawyer.
Founding Partner, VB Attorneys — Houston, Texas.
Seventh-generation Texan. Texas A&M University — letterman, Corps of Cadets, Ross Volunteers. University of Texas School of Law, with honors — Chief Notes Editor, Texas Law Review; Research Assistant to Professor Charles Alan Wright; admiralty studies under Professor David W. Robertson.