You own a boat. You want work for your boat. You find customers, and you also find people who know customers. For a little slice of the action, they’ll get you work with the customer.
Y’all want a good, solid written contract to button this up. But everybody has their own pecadillos when it comes to contracts and so there are all sorts out there. It gets to be a lot where there is a broker involved too, because the broker ordinarily signs the contract with the customer, and then wants to pass those risks off to the owner. Then there are all these other contracts between the customer and all its other contractors and subs.
Here, there’s one contract between the customer and the broker, and another between the broker and the owner, and a third between the customer and its other contractor, who is a crane operator. A person on the vessel gets hurt because the crane operator messed up. Often, the contracts will say “you’re on for your dudes and you gotta take care of me and my contractors and my subs.” Sometimes, it will say “you’re on for your dudes and you gotta take care of me, but my contractors are on their own.”
Here, the contract between the broker and the customer said “you gotta take care of me” but didn’t say anything about subs. And the contract between the broker and the owner was sort of a different one. It said “you gotta take care of me, and my customer, and my customer’s customer, and my customer’s customer’s customer, and all of their neighbors and contractors and subcontractors and dog walkers and everybody else in the whole world.” And then it had a limitation, which was, roughly, this: “you have to take care of all these people and groups and such, BUT ONLY if I have to take care of them in my contract.” The crane operator read the contract to say that the limitation didn’t apply, and we read the contract to say the limitation did apply, and we won at the district court level and then again at the Fifth Circuit. Which was great. Every time I say this I feel a little weird, but contracts are entirely my jam.