Fort Worth offshore workers leave Tarrant County on 14-and-14 or 28-and-28 rotations, work a hitch on a Gulf platform or rig off Louisiana or in federal waters, and fly home to the DFW Metroplex. A worker who comes back hurt is treated and followed at JPS Health Network on South Main Street, Tarrant County’s Level I trauma center, or at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth on Pennsylvania Avenue, and those records build the case. The operator writes its own incident report on the platform, and BSEE investigates a serious incident on an Outer Continental Shelf structure. When the suit is brought in state court, a Tarrant County worker files with the Tarrant County District Clerk in the Tarrant County Civil District Courts at 100 N. Calhoun Street. Trey Morris Injury Lawyers pulls your payroll records, work schedules, and deployment logs to fix how much of your time was spent aboard a vessel, and identifies every company in your employment chain.
The law that governs the claim is federal maritime law, and where you live in Texas does not change it. A qualifying offshore seaman sues the employer under the Jones Act, 46 U.S.C. 30104, on a three-year federal clock. Platform and harbor workers who are not seamen proceed under the LHWCA, 33 U.S.C. 901 et seq. Trey Morris Injury Lawyers classifies that maritime injury from the vessel and the structure before Texas Chapter 33 is used on a federal admiralty file.
Fort Worth Workers and the Gulf Coast Offshore Industry
DFW Metroplex
The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area, covering Tarrant County and surrounding counties in North Texas. Home to major oil and gas industry corporate offices and a large offshore energy workforce.
The DFW Metroplex is a major labor source for Gulf of Mexico offshore platforms. Thousands of workers from the Fort Worth area travel to the Gulf Coast on rotational schedules. Common rotations are 14 days on, 14 days off, or 28 on, 28 off.
These workers hold jobs in oil and gas extraction, offshore drilling, pipeline construction, and floating production operations. They leave Fort Worth, work a hitch on a rig or platform in Louisiana or federal waters, and return home. When an injury happens on that platform, where you live does not control which law applies.
Federal maritime law governs offshore injuries regardless of the worker’s home state. Living in Tarrant County does not make Texas personal injury law applicable to a claim that arises in federal waters. This matters because federal maritime law and Texas state law have different deadlines, different causation standards, and different fault systems. Getting the jurisdiction wrong can end a viable claim.
Federal maritime law and Texas state tort law are different bodies of law, and an attorney without specific maritime experience may apply the wrong framework from the start. Trey Morris Injury Lawyers handles both federal maritime and Texas state claims and can identify which applies to your situation.
What Law Governs Your Offshore Injury Claim?
LHWCA
Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, 33 U.S.C. 901 et seq. A federal workers’ compensation statute covering maritime workers who do not qualify as Jones Act seamen, including workers on fixed offshore platforms.
OCSLA
Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, 43 U.S.C. 1331 et seq. Extends federal jurisdiction to fixed platforms on the OCS and imports the law of the adjacent state as surrogate federal law.
Three federal statutes govern most offshore injury claims for Gulf Coast workers: the Jones Act, the LHWCA, and OCSLA. Which statute applies depends on two factors: your worker classification and the type of structure where the injury occurred.
proportionate responsibility
Texas’s fault system under CPRC Chapter 33. If you are 51% or more at fault, you recover nothing. If you are 50% or less at fault, your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault. This system does NOT apply to Jones Act or general maritime law claims.
These are federal laws. Texas proportionate responsibility rules under CPRC Chapter 33 do not govern Jones Act or general maritime law claims. That is not a technicality. It changes everything about how fault is calculated.
Maritime law follows pure comparative fault, an admiralty doctrine separate from Texas state law. Under pure comparative fault, you can recover even if you are 99% at fault. Your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, but it is never eliminated by it. A worker who is 80% responsible for their own injury still recovers 20% of their damages under maritime law. The Texas 51% bar that applies to state tort claims does not exist in federal admiralty.
Offshore platforms on the Outer Continental Shelf, beyond three nautical miles from shore, fall under OCSLA. OCSLA imports the law of the adjacent state as surrogate federal law. For Gulf of Mexico platforms, that means Louisiana workers’ compensation and tort law apply to injury claims on fixed OCS structures, not Texas law. A Fort Worth worker injured on a fixed Gulf platform may find that Louisiana law, not Texas law, governs the substance of their claim.
For workers covered by Texas workers’ compensation, the interaction with maritime claims can be complicated. Texas employers can opt out of workers’ comp entirely. If your employer is a non-subscriber, the maritime framework may be your primary remedy. Sorting this out early determines your legal path.
Jones Act: The Primary Law for Injured Seamen
Jones Act
46 U.S.C. 30104. A federal law allowing maritime workers who qualify as seamen to sue their employer for negligence. Provides a lower causation standard than common law and a three-year statute of limitations.
The Jones Act (46 U.S.C. 30104) is the primary federal remedy for injured offshore workers who qualify as seamen. Not every offshore worker qualifies. The distinction is critical.
The Seaman Status Test
To qualify as a Jones Act seaman, a worker must spend at least 30% of their working time aboard a vessel or fleet of vessels in navigation. The vessel must be in actual navigation, not drydocked or permanently moored. Drillships, semi-submersible rigs, jack-up rigs (when floating), supply boats, crew boats, and pipe-lay barges can all qualify as vessels. Fixed platforms bolted to the seabed are not vessels. Workers on fixed platforms cannot be Jones Act seamen.
This 30% test is a threshold, not a guarantee. Courts look at the nature of the worker’s duties, which vessels they were assigned to, and the permanence of the assignment. An employer who wants to avoid Jones Act liability will argue that a worker’s time aboard vessels falls below 30%. Your attorney should analyze your actual work records, not just your job title, to determine seaman status.
Seaman status is one of the most contested issues in maritime law, and an attorney who accepts the employer’s characterization without independent analysis may cost you the most favorable legal framework for your case. We examine payroll records, work schedules, and deployment logs to build the seaman status case from the evidence up.
Jones Act Causation and Filing Deadline
featherweight causation
The Jones Act negligence standard. A worker only needs to show that employer negligence played any part, no matter how small, in causing the injury. This is a lower standard than the common-law “but for” causation test.
The Jones Act uses a featherweight causation standard. The employer’s negligence only needs to have played any part, however slight, in causing the injury. This is a significantly lower bar than the common-law “but for” causation test that applies to Texas state tort claims.
The Jones Act statute of limitations is three years from the date of injury under 46 U.S.C. 30106. This is not the same as the two-year Texas statute of limitations under CPRC Section 16.003. If you apply the Texas deadline to a maritime claim, you may misjudge how much time you have. Know which deadline controls your claim.
For workers who may also have claims against third parties under construction site accident theories, the interaction of maritime and state law deadlines requires careful attention.
Maintenance and Cure: The Seaman’s Safety Net
Maintenance and cure
A centuries-old maritime doctrine separate from Jones Act negligence. Requires an employer to pay a daily living allowance (maintenance) and all reasonable medical costs (cure) to an injured seaman until Maximum Medical Improvement, regardless of fault.
Maintenance and cure is the oldest protection in American maritime law. It predates the Jones Act by centuries. An employer owes maintenance and cure to any seaman who becomes ill or injured in the service of the vessel. Fault does not matter.
MMI
Maximum Medical Improvement. The point at which a treating physician determines that a seaman’s condition has stabilized and further treatment will not produce significant improvement. Reaching MMI ends the employer’s cure obligation.
Maintenance is a daily living allowance. Cure is the employer’s obligation to pay all reasonable and necessary medical treatment until the seaman reaches Maximum Medical Improvement. MMI is the endpoint of cure, not recovery. A seaman may still be disabled and in pain when an employer declares MMI. The distinction matters for what comes after.
Willful refusal to pay maintenance and cure is one of the few situations in maritime law where punitive damages and attorney’s fees are available. Employers know this. They dispute maintenance rates and challenge MMI determinations as a standard tactic to reduce their exposure. These disputes run parallel to the negligence claim and require separate attention.
Maintenance rates have historically been set low by contracts and custom. Current rates in many cases are well below actual living costs. Challenging the maintenance rate and the employer’s MMI determination requires an attorney who handles maintenance and cure disputes as a distinct practice area, not as a side note to the main case.
Maintenance and cure disputes and the Jones Act negligence claim require different strategies and separate negotiation timelines, and an attorney who treats maintenance and cure as a formality, not a contested benefit, may leave money on the table.
LHWCA: Coverage for Non-Seaman Maritime Workers
Workers who do not qualify as Jones Act seamen may be covered by the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act (33 U.S.C. 901 et seq.), a federal no-fault compensation system. LHWCA claimants typically include dock workers, crane operators, shipbuilders, and workers on fixed offshore platforms who spend their time on a structure bolted to the seabed rather than a vessel.
LHWCA is a no-fault compensation system. It provides wage replacement at two-thirds of your average weekly wage and full medical benefits without requiring proof of employer negligence. That sounds straightforward. It is not always favorable.
LHWCA compensation does not bar a separate third-party negligence suit. If the platform owner, a vessel operator, or an equipment manufacturer contributed to your injury, you can pursue a negligence claim against that third party while collecting LHWCA compensation. Understanding whether such third parties exist is often where the real recovery is.
The LHWCA filing deadline is one year from the date of injury under 33 U.S.C. 913. This is significantly shorter than the Jones Act’s three-year period. Workers who assume the Texas two-year statute of limitations applies, or who assume they have three years because they heard that somewhere, may miss the LHWCA deadline entirely. One missed year permanently bars the claim.
Whether you are a Jones Act seaman or an LHWCA claimant is the first question that must be answered correctly. It controls your available remedies, your deadlines, and your recovery ceiling.
OCSLA: Outer Continental Shelf Accidents
Fixed platforms on the Gulf of Mexico OCS are governed by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (43 U.S.C. 1331 et seq.), which extends federal jurisdiction to structures located beyond three nautical miles from shore and imports Louisiana law as surrogate federal law for injury claims.
OCSLA’s key provision for injury claims is the surrogate law rule. OCSLA imports the law of the adjacent state as surrogate federal law for claims that are not covered by another federal statute. For Gulf of Mexico platforms, the adjacent state is Louisiana. This means Louisiana’s workers’ compensation law and tort law apply to injury claims on fixed OCS platforms, not Texas law.
A DFW-area worker injured on a fixed OCS platform may have claims governed substantially by Louisiana law. This is not intuitive. The worker lives in Fort Worth. The employer may be based in Houston. The platform sits in the Gulf. But Louisiana law is the surrogate federal law for that claim.
BSEE, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, regulates offshore platform safety under 30 C.F.R. Part 250. BSEE enforces Safety and Environmental Management Systems requirements, which impose specific operator duties for hazard identification, equipment inspection, emergency response, and incident investigation. A BSEE violation creates evidence of negligence. Operators who fail to maintain SEMS programs or who ignore inspection findings have documented failures that support a negligence claim.
Past results do not guarantee future outcomes; each case is decided on its own facts. See our full case results.
Fixed Platform vs. Floating Vessel: Why the Distinction Matters
The legal framework for your injury claim depends on one threshold question: was the worksite a fixed structure or a floating vessel? This is not always obvious from the name of the equipment.
Fixed structures include production platforms, wellhead structures, and caissons permanently attached to the seabed. Fixed platform workers are covered by LHWCA and OCSLA, not the Jones Act. Floating structures include semi-submersible rigs, drillships, and floating production storage and offloading vessels. Workers on floating vessels may qualify as Jones Act seamen.
Jack-up rigs occupy contested legal ground. A jack-up is a mobile offshore drilling unit that can be floated to location and then extended on legs to the seabed during drilling operations. Courts have split on whether a jack-up engaged in drilling operations is a vessel or a fixed platform. The Fifth Circuit addressed this in Barker v. Hercules Offshore, 713 F.3d 208 (5th Cir. 2013), holding that a jack-up in the elevated drilling position was not a vessel. Other cases have reached different conclusions on different facts.
The classification determines three things: whether Jones Act seaman status is possible, which statute provides the compensation framework, and whether state law applies. Employers and their insurers invest resources in arguing that a worker was on a fixed structure rather than a vessel. That argument reduces their exposure significantly. An experienced maritime attorney checks the actual equipment, the operational status at the time of injury, and the applicable case law, not just the employer’s characterization.
Borrowed Servant Doctrine in Offshore Cases
borrowed servant doctrine
A legal doctrine that can shift Jones Act employer status to the entity that exercises day-to-day operational control over a worker, even if that entity did not issue the worker’s paycheck. Common in offshore cases where workers are employed by staffing companies but supervised by platform operators.
Many offshore workers are employed by a staffing company or drilling subcontractor. They show up on a platform operated by a major oil company that did not hire them directly. The borrowed servant doctrine can make the platform operator, not the staffing company, the Jones Act employer for purposes of the injury claim.
The test is operational control. If the platform operator controls how you do your work, directs your day-to-day tasks, and supervises your activities on the rig, it may be your Jones Act employer. The entity that signs your paycheck is not necessarily the employer for maritime law purposes.
This matters because the Jones Act defendant is the employer. If you name only the staffing company and the platform operator was your actual borrowed employer, you may have sued the wrong party. Both the nominal employer and the borrowing employer can have liability depending on the facts, but the analysis requires examining the actual supervisory relationship on the platform.
Vessel owners face a parallel exposure under the unseaworthiness doctrine of general maritime law, separate from the Jones Act employer analysis.
Unseaworthiness Claims Against Vessel Owners
Unseaworthiness
A general maritime law claim against a vessel owner for failing to provide a reasonably fit vessel, equipment, or crew. This is a strict liability standard — the owner does not need to have known about the defect. It is separate from Jones Act employer negligence.
Under general maritime law, vessel owners owe an absolute duty to provide a seaworthy vessel. Unseaworthiness means the vessel, its equipment, or its crew were not reasonably fit for their intended purpose at the time of the injury. This is a strict liability standard.
The vessel owner does not need to have known about the condition that caused the injury. A defective winch, a slippery deck without adequate traction, a safety system that failed under normal operating conditions, or an inadequately trained crew member can all support an unseaworthiness claim without proof that the owner had advance notice.
Unseaworthiness runs against the vessel owner. The Jones Act claim runs against the employer. These are separate defendants in many cases. The same accident can produce parallel Jones Act negligence claims and unseaworthiness claims, potentially against different parties. Building both claims at the outset requires understanding both legal theories and identifying every potentially liable party.
Your Fort Worth Injury Attorneys
Founder Trey Morris leads every injury case the firm takes.
What Compensation Does Federal Maritime Law Allow?
The available damages depend on which statute covers your claim.
loss of earning capacity
The difference between what you could have earned over your working lifetime before the injury and what you can earn after. Calculated using vocational expert testimony and present-value economic analysis.
Under the Jones Act and general maritime law, an injured seaman can recover past and future medical expenses, past and future lost wages, loss of earning capacity, pain and suffering, mental anguish, and disfigurement. These are broad damages that reflect the full economic and human impact of the injury.
LHWCA provides wage replacement at 66.67% of your average weekly wage and full medical coverage. Non-economic damages like pain and suffering are not available through LHWCA compensation. This is one reason why identifying third-party liability alongside the LHWCA claim matters. The LHWCA compensation covers the floor; a negligence claim against a third party provides the ceiling.
For deaths at sea, the Death on the High Seas Act (46 U.S.C. 30301 et seq.) applies to deaths occurring more than three nautical miles from shore. DOHSA limits recovery to pecuniary damages only. Pain and suffering of the deceased is not recoverable under DOHSA. For deaths within three nautical miles, state wrongful death law may allow broader recovery including non-economic damages.
Loss of consortium claims for surviving spouses may be available depending on which law applies and where the death occurred. These are claims in their own right, separate from the estate’s claims, and they require their own analysis.
View our case results to see our offshore and maritime recovery record. We do not list dollar amounts on practice area pages.
Filing Deadlines for Offshore Injury Claims
Offshore injury claims carry three different deadlines: three years under the Jones Act, one year under the LHWCA, and three years under general maritime law. The Texas two-year statute of limitations does not govern federal maritime claims.
Jones Act claims have a three-year statute of limitations from the date of injury under 46 U.S.C. 30106. General maritime claims for personal injury and death also carry a three-year period. These are federal deadlines and are not the same as the two-year Texas statute of limitations under CPRC Section 16.003. The Texas deadline does not govern federal maritime claims.
The LHWCA filing deadline is one year from the date of injury under 33 U.S.C. 913. Claims must be filed with the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs within that year. DOHSA carries a three-year period from the date of death.
The one-year LHWCA deadline is the most commonly missed. Workers assume they have two or three years because that is what they have heard about injury claims. The LHWCA deadline is shorter and non-obvious. Missing it permanently bars the claim, with very limited exceptions.
Your attorney should identify which statute or statutes apply to your claim and calendar all applicable deadlines.
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Testimonials do not constitute a guarantee, warranty, or prediction regarding the outcome of your legal matter. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Fort Worth Offshore Accident Attorneys: What Trey Morris Injury Lawyers Brings
Trey Morris Injury Lawyers represents offshore workers from the DFW area with claims arising on Gulf Coast platforms and vessels. Our attorneys are Board Certified Personal Injury Trial Lawyers by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, one of the highest credentials available to Texas trial lawyers. Board certification in personal injury trial law requires a demonstrated record of trial work and a peer-reviewed examination.
We have handled maritime injury cases for over 20 years, including Jones Act seaman claims, LHWCA coverage disputes, unseaworthiness claims against vessel owners, and maintenance and cure enforcement. We have 2,791 five-star Google reviews across our offices. Our Fort Worth clients are part of a firm that has built its practice on complex injury cases, not volume settlement work.
When you consult with us about a maritime claim, we identify your worker classification, the applicable law, and all filing deadlines. We do not assume the Texas framework applies until we have confirmed it. If your claim is governed by federal maritime law, we treat it accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
I live in Fort Worth but was injured on an offshore platform in the Gulf. Which state's law applies to my case?
What is the difference between a Jones Act seaman and a regular offshore worker?
My employer is telling me to file a Texas workers' compensation claim after my offshore injury. Is that correct?
How long do I have to file an offshore injury claim?
What is maintenance and cure, and does my employer have to pay it?
Can I sue the platform owner even if my employer is a separate company?
What if the offshore platform was in international waters?
Does maritime law allow punitive damages?
Last updated October 16, 2026