Gillies v. Valaris PLC — $7.86 Million Jones Act & Unseaworthiness Verdict

Sixteen years offshore, sent to bring other rigs up to standard.

The plaintiff: an experienced offshore drillship seaman

Gordon Gillies, a Scottish national, came up the offshore ladder one rank at a time — hired by Ensco as a toolpusher in 2004 and rising over sixteen years to Offshore Installation Manager, then Rig Manager, then Advisor for Operations Performance. By January 2020 his job was to go aboard other rigs, evaluate them, and bring them up to Valaris standards. He had taught the company's own safety programs. He was about as experienced as offshore professionals get — which is exactly what the defense would try to use against him.

The second step from the bottom.

How the Valaris Renaissance drillship stairway injury happened

The Valaris DS-15 — the Valaris Renaissance is a modern ultra-deepwater drillship. Days after boarding it, descending the short flight of stairs from the derrick elevator, Mr. Gillies stepped on a tread whose protective non-slip bullnose had been ripped off. Five to seven jagged stub-protrusions were all that remained where the edge should have been. He fell and landed on his lower back. The rig medic completed an Injury or Illness Report that same afternoon; the company's own photographs of the stripped step went into the incident file the next day. The injury was a sacroiliac joint injury — non-surgical, but unresolved nearly two years later, with a continuing pain syndrome and a later PTSD diagnosis.

"An experienced seaman should have seen it."

Valaris’s open-and-obvious and comparative-negligence defense

Valaris ran the defense offshore employers reach for again and again: open and obvious. A sixteen-year professional should have noticed a missing stair edge and stepped around it. The company also attacked credibility — pointing to a single line in a medic's report that Mr. Gillies had "turned to speak to a crew member" before slipping (the medic admitted he could not confirm it) — and argued the vessel was merely "fit for use," a phrase that appears in no regulation or Valaris document.

The defense had a problem its own evidence had created.

The company's own paper against the company.

How Valaris’s own inspection records proved notice and unseaworthiness

The same defect had been on the same stair for months — meaning the dozens of crew who walked it daily had not "seen" it either, which turned the open-and-obvious theory into an indictment of Valaris's own safety system. And the proof came from Valaris itself. Its Critical Area Verification — Drill Floor checklist required stairways to be "fitted with non-slip nosing and toe boards." The company's photograph from the afternoon of the fall showed the opposite. And the rig's senior safety training coordinator conceded, on deposition, that the step "should have been repaired before Mr. Gillies ever approached it" — and that he could identify nothing Mr. Gillies had done wrong.

Four days on Zoom. Two hours to decide.

The Jones Act and unseaworthiness verdict: $7,861,000

The entire trial — voir dire, every witness, closing, and verdict — was conducted on Zoom during COVID, before the Hon. Dedra Davis. After two hours, the jury returned $7,861,000, finding Valaris 90% at fault on the Jones Act negligence claim and 99% at fault on the unseaworthiness claim. The award broke down as:

Valaris's motion for new trial and for JNOV was denied, and the verdict was recognized as a Top 20 Texas verdict for 2022. The case is a clean illustration of two doctrines working together — the unseaworthiness claim (no fault required, 99% here) and the Jones Act negligence claim under its featherweight causation standard — and of how often the strongest evidence in an offshore case is the company's own safety paperwork.