By cruise ship attorney, Joel Barnett
If you are injured on a cruise ship, you may assume you have plenty of time to decide whether to pursue a claim. Unfortunately, that is often not the case.
Cruise ship injury claims are subject to specific deadlines that can be much shorter than the deadlines that apply to many personal injury claims on land. If you wait too long to take action, you could lose the ability to recover compensation, even if the cruise line was responsible for your injury.
Cruise Ship Injury Claims Have Strict Deadlines
Cruise lines typically include time limits for injury claims in their passenger ticket contracts. These contracts are more than simply a receipt for your cruise. They contain legal terms governing your rights as a passenger, including when and where a lawsuit must be filed. Sadly, most people never really read this contract even though they are obligated to sign it before boarding their cruise ship.
Under federal maritime law, a cruise line generally can require passengers to provide written notice of a personal injury claim within six months of the injury (sometimes read as 185 days) and can limit the time for filing a lawsuit to (1) one year from the date of the injury. Federal law establishes these as minimum time periods for covered seagoing vessels.
Many major cruise lines use these deadlines in their passenger contracts. For example, Royal Caribbean’s current ticket contract requires written notice of a personal injury, illness, or death claim within six months and requires a lawsuit to be filed within one year.
This means there may actually be two important deadlines to keep track of.
The Six-Month Notice Deadline
The first deadline may require you to provide the cruise line with written notice of your claim within six months of the date of your injury.
This is not necessarily the same thing as filing a lawsuit. A passenger may still have time to file a lawsuit after providing notice, but the notice requirement must be addressed first if the ticket contract requires it.
There are limited circumstances under federal law where failure to provide timely notice may not automatically prevent recovery, such as when the cruise line already knew about the injury and was not prejudiced by the lack of notice. However, passengers should not rely on an exception to protect their claim.
The One-Year Deadline to File a Lawsuit
The second and often more important deadline is the time limit for filing a lawsuit.
For many cruise ship injury claims, the passenger ticket contract requires a lawsuit to be filed within one year of the date of the injury. Courts have enforced these provisions when the contract properly communicates the deadline to passengers.
Waiting until the end of that period can create serious problems. A cruise ship attorney may need time to investigate what happened, obtain medical records, identify witnesses, review the cruise line’s records, determine which parties may be responsible, and prepare the case for litigation.
The Deadline May Not Be the Only Issue
Cruise ticket contracts can contain other important provisions affecting an injury claim, including requirements concerning where a lawsuit must be filed – a forum selection clause.
For example, some cruise lines require passenger injury lawsuits to be brought in a particular court. Many of the most popular cruise lines will dictate that Miami-Dade, Florida is the jurisdiction. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld forum-selection provisions in cruise ticket contracts under certain circumstances.
That means an injured passenger cannot always assume that a lawsuit can be filed in the state where they live – or where the ship happened to be when the injury occurred.
What Should You Do After a Cruise Ship Injury?
If you were injured on a cruise, it is important to determine the applicable deadlines as soon as possible. Keep your cruise documents and ticket contract, report the incident as appropriate, seek necessary medical treatment, and preserve records related to your injury.
Most importantly, do not wait until the deadline is approaching before speaking with an experienced cruise injury attorney.
At CruiseLawyers.com, our attorneys handle claims involving injuries to cruise passengers and understand the unique requirements that apply to these cases. We can review the circumstances of your injury, examine the applicable cruise ticket contract, identify important deadlines, and help you understand your legal options.
The sooner you address a cruise ship injury claim, the more opportunity there is to protect your rights.