Jurisdiction, International Security, Bribery, and the Duty to Protect Seamen
People ask me sometimes what was the hardest case I ever handled. The honest answer is that there is no single answer — every case has a different kind of hard. But if the question is which case required the greatest combination of legal sophistication, strategic thinking, factual investigation, political navigation, and sheer stubbornness, the Maersk Alabama litigation is the answer. And it is not particularly close.
It was one of the most complex maritime cases in the history of American admiralty law. It involved simultaneous litigation in federal and state courts across three different states, with three separate active lawsuits running at one point concurrently — each with its own judge, its own procedural history, its own discovery disputes, its own timeline. It implicated some of the most sensitive and highly confidential international security protocols in the maritime world. The entire international shipping industry followed the case because its outcome would shape the legal standards governing crew safety in high-risk waters for decades. It was also being fought against the backdrop of a Hollywood publicity campaign that was simultaneously shaping the public narrative in ways that made the legal work harder. And it required, at every step, keeping the focus on the actual human beings whose lives had been disrupted by one night of violence on the Indian Ocean.
The Attack: What Actually Happened on April 8, 2009
The MV Maersk Alabama was a United States-flagged container ship, operated by Waterman Steamship Corporation under contract with Maersk Lines Limited — one of the largest container shipping companies on the planet. She was en route from Salalah, Oman, to Mombasa, Kenya, carrying, among other things, food aid bound for Somalia and Uganda. She was sailing through waters that were, by the spring of 2009, among the most dangerous on earth. Somali piracy had exploded. In 2008 alone, pirates had seized over forty vessels in the waters off Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden. The International Maritime Bureau had issued repeated warnings. The maritime industry was well aware of the threat.
On the morning of April 8, a small skiff approached the Alabama. It carried four armed pirates. What followed was not the passive victim narrative that Hollywood would later present. The crew fought back. Using fire hoses, evasive maneuvering, and improvised defenses, they resisted the initial boarding. Crew members ultimately captured one of the pirates. Captain Richard Phillips ended up in the pirates’ lifeboat. Over the following four days, the USS Bainbridge monitored the lifeboat. On April 12, Navy SEAL snipers killed three pirates and rescued Captain Phillips. The fourth pirate, captured by the crew and held aboard the Bainbridge, was later tried and sentenced in federal court in New York.
That is the version of events that became the movie. What the movie did not tell you is what came before — and what came after.
The Legal Architecture: Federal Courts, State Courts, Three States
When the crew of the Maersk Alabama approached me to represent them, the first challenge was purely jurisdictional. Maritime law is a body of federal law — the Jones Act, the general maritime law, and the Limitation of Liability Act all operate in the federal system. But the Alabama cases were complicated by the fact that crew members were domiciled in different states, the corporate defendants were organized and operating across multiple jurisdictions, and there were overlapping questions about which court, in which state, had proper jurisdiction over which claims and which defendants.
The litigation proceeded in both federal and state courts simultaneously. At one point, there were three separate active lawsuits running concurrently across three different states — with different judges in different jurisdictions, each with its own discovery schedule, procedural posture, and legal landscape. Managing simultaneous multi-jurisdictional litigation without losing strategic coherence is a challenge that most large firms handle with teams of dozens of lawyers. We managed it with a small, highly focused team.
The key corporate defendant, Maersk Lines Limited, is a Danish company with operations in every major port on earth, revenues in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and a legal department with the resources to wage indefinite warfare against a plaintiffs’ firm in Houston. They knew it. We knew it. The question was whether we could match their resources with our preparation, and their size with our tenacity.
The answer, ultimately, was yes.
The Duty to Protect: What the Law Required and What Maersk Ignored
The central legal theory in the Maersk Alabama litigation was not complicated, even though the facts behind it were. Under the Jones Act and general maritime law, an employer owes its seamen a duty to provide a reasonably safe place to work. That duty includes the obligation to protect seamen from foreseeable dangers — including, where the facts warrant, the foreseeable danger of piracy.
By 2009, the danger of Somali piracy was not a theoretical risk. It was a documented, widely reported, institutionally acknowledged crisis. The International Maritime Bureau had issued specific warnings about the waters in which the Alabama was sailing. Other vessels had been seized. The maritime industry was actively debating what security measures were appropriate. There were options available — rerouting, armed escorts, evasive maneuvering protocols, hardening the vessel — that had been used by other ships operating in the same waters.
The Alabama had essentially none of those protections.
Our theory was straightforward: Maersk knew the risk. Other similarly situated companies had responded to that risk by taking protective measures. Maersk had not taken adequate measures. As a direct result, the crew was attacked, held hostage, and traumatized in ways that had lasting effects on their lives and health. The crew did not assume the risk of piracy when they signed on to sail in what they were told were safe commercial waters. They assumed the risk of the ordinary hazards of maritime employment. They did not assume the risk of an employer’s corporate decision to cut corners on security to protect the bottom line.
Maersk denied all of it. They denied negligence, denied foreseeability, denied that additional security measures would have made a difference. And they had very good lawyers making those arguments very aggressively.
International Security Protocols: The Part We Cannot Discuss in Detail
Among the most significant — and most sensitive — dimensions of the Maersk Alabama litigation was the involvement of highly confidential international security protocols. The case touched on matters involving government agencies, classified information, and security arrangements at a level of sensitivity that required careful management throughout the litigation.
I am constrained in what I can say about this publicly, and I will respect those constraints. What I can say is this: the security issues in this case went significantly beyond the four corners of a standard negligence claim. They implicated questions about how piracy networks operated, how information about vessel movements was obtained, and what security infrastructure was — or was not — in place to protect American mariners sailing in the most dangerous waters on earth. The entire international shipping industry followed the case closely, in part because the answers to those questions would determine what legal obligations shipping companies had to their crews going forward.
Managing a litigation that involves classified or highly sensitive security information requires a specific kind of discipline. It requires understanding what you can use, what you cannot use, what you can allude to, and what must remain in the dark. It requires working with government agencies that have their own interests in the proceeding and who may not share those interests with you. And it requires keeping your clients informed about a litigation that involves factors they cannot fully be told about, in a way that maintains their trust and their confidence in the process.
We navigated all of it.
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Corporate Accountability
Beyond the security questions, the investigation into the Alabama attack raised issues that went to the conduct of the corporate defendants themselves. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits American companies and their employees from making corrupt payments to foreign officials. Its application in the maritime context is complex — the statute covers a broader range of conduct than is commonly understood, and maritime industry operations in ports and waters governed by foreign regulatory regimes create numerous potential pressure points.
We examined these issues carefully in discovery and in our investigation of the full factual record. The legal significance of what we found was one of the factors that shaped the arc of the litigation and contributed to the eventual resolution on terms that were favorable to our clients.
The Captain Phillips Deposition
One of the more significant evidentiary developments in the litigation was the deposition of Captain Richard Phillips — who had by 2013 become a substantial public figure, a published author, and the real-life subject of a Tom Hanks film.
That deposition is confidential. There was, at some point, a leak — material found its way to CNN — but the deposition record itself remains under seal, and I am going to respect that. What I can say, in broad strokes, is that the deposition process in a case like this one — where the witness is simultaneously a media figure, a central fact witness, and someone whose public account of events differs in material ways from the accounts of the people who served under his command — presents a specific set of strategic and legal challenges. A good deposition does not simply establish facts. It establishes the record that will constrain the witness at trial, lock in their version of events in granular detail, and surface the inconsistencies and omissions that will matter when the jury is evaluating credibility. We did what needed to be done. The record speaks for itself, to the extent it can ever speak publicly.
The Hollywood Problem: Litigation Alongside a Publicity War
There is a version of the Maersk Alabama story in which a brave captain is taken hostage by pirates and rescued by Navy SEALs while his crew waits safely aboard the ship. That version was produced for roughly $55 million and grossed over $218 million worldwide. It starred Tom Hanks.
That is not what happened.
The crew of the Maersk Alabama was not passively waiting. They fought. They captured a pirate. They used every tool available to resist an attack by armed men on the open ocean. And when Captain Phillips ended up in that lifeboat, the circumstances were more complicated than the film suggested.
The problem for our litigation was that the film was in production and then in active release during the period when we were building and litigating our cases. Any potential juror in any of the jurisdictions where we were litigating would have seen, or heard of, a movie that told a version of events fundamentally different from the one our clients were living. The movie was not going to make our cases easier.
Managing a litigation narrative in the face of a major Hollywood film about the same events requires specific work. It requires media engagement — telling the crew’s story through legitimate channels, making sure journalists covering the case had access to actual facts. It requires legal vigilance — monitoring public statements for factual claims that could be challenged. And it requires client management — keeping the crew focused on the legal process when the public narrative was constantly presenting a version of events that minimized their trauma and their claims.
We did all of it. We engaged the media. We told the real story. We made sure the counter-narrative — the one centered on the crew’s experience, their bravery, their injuries, and their employer’s failures — reached the people who needed to hear it.
The Resolution and Its Legacy
The Maersk Alabama litigation was resolved through confidential settlements — individually negotiated for each of the crew members we represented. The terms remain confidential. What is not confidential is the effect.
The cases changed the way the international maritime shipping industry thinks about crew security in high-risk waters. The litigation — and the legal and reputational pressure it created — contributed to an industry-wide shift toward the provision of armed security personnel on vessels transiting pirate-prone waters. Today, ships sailing in the waters where the Alabama was attacked routinely carry armed security teams. That was not universally true in 2009. The cases helped make it the standard.
There is also a less visible legacy: the legal record established in the Alabama litigation — the discovery, the expert testimony on maritime security standards, the jurisdictional work across multiple courts — became part of the foundation on which subsequent maritime security cases were built. The question of what standard of care a vessel operator owes to its crew with respect to foreseeable security threats was sharpened, in significant part, by the work done in these cases.
Why This Case Stands Apart
I have been practicing law for a long time. I have handled cases that were more difficult on any single dimension — cases with more money at stake, cases with harder legal questions. But the Maersk Alabama litigation was unique in the particular constellation of challenges it presented simultaneously.
It required mastery of the Jones Act and general maritime law at the level of sophistication you would normally only see in an academic context. It required the ability to manage simultaneous litigation in federal and state courts across multiple jurisdictions without losing strategic coherence. It required the willingness to take on one of the world’s largest corporations in a case where they had every advantage of size and resources. It required the ability to investigate and use intelligence that implicated highly confidential international security matters. It required management of corporate corruption issues. And it required managing a public narrative that was being actively shaped by one of the most powerful entertainment industries on earth.
The real heroes of the Maersk Alabama story were not the person who got the book deal and the Hollywood movie. They were the crew — the ordinary working men who went to sea to do a job and came home changed forever. Getting them justice was among the most important work I have done as a lawyer.
The Maersk Alabama case is, by any objective measure, one of the more significant pieces of Jones Act litigation in the history of American maritime law. Not because of the fame of the underlying events. Not solely because of the financial results. But because of the legal work that went into it — the investigative rigor, the jurisdictional strategy, the multi-court management, the security protocol navigation, the narrative work — all in service of working men who had been through something no person should have to endure, and who deserved a lawyer who would fight for them at the highest possible level.
That is what we did.