Williams v. Diamond Offshore — A Jones Act Verdict the Comparative-Fault Rule Couldn’t Erase

A seaman, a drilling vessel, and an injury that ended a career.

Willie David Williams was a seaman working aboard the Ocean Lexington, a drilling vessel in the Diamond Offshore fleet. His employer was Diamond Offshore Services Limited; the vessel itself was owned by Diamond Offshore Services Company.

The work that injured him was done at the direction of the company, in conditions a seaman has little power to refuse. When the injury proved career-altering, Williams brought two separate claims that maritime law makes available to an injured crew member: that his employer was negligent under the Jones Act, and that the vessel was unseaworthy.

Diamond is headquartered in Houston, and the case was tried in Harris County, Texas — the 152nd Judicial District, before Judge Robert K. Schaffer. That a U.S. seaman could hold a U.S.-based operator accountable in a U.S. courtroom was itself a fight worth having, and one worth winning.

The Jones Act and unseaworthiness are different theories — and a jury can answer them differently.

An injured seaman in Williams’ position has two distinct claims, and they do not rise and fall together. The Jones Act asks whether the employer was negligent. Unseaworthiness asks whether the vessel and its crew were reasonably fit for their intended use — a duty the owner cannot delegate and cannot escape with care or caution. A jury can find one without the other. Here, it did exactly that.

This is a point most injured workers never hear explained: losing one theory does not lose the case. The negligence finding alone was enough to support the judgment.

Diamond’s play: put the fault on the seaman.

In a case where the employer’s negligence is hard to deny, the defense pivots to the plaintiff. The argument is always some version of the same theme: he’s an experienced hand; he knew the risks; whatever happened, he had a duty to protect himself. The charge itself instructs the jury that a seaman must exercise the care a reasonable seaman would use in like circumstances.

The defense put the blame on him. The recovery still stood.

The retrial jury valued the total harm at $3,665,420. The defense had spent the trial doing what offshore defendants always do — arguing the seaman caused his own injury — and the jury did allocate fault between the two sides, leaving Williams a 25% recoverable share. Under the Jones Act’s pure comparative-fault rule, that allocation could not bar the claim. The court applied the reduction, credited the advance wages Diamond had already paid, and entered judgment for the balance, with post-judgment interest running until paid.

That is the rule that separates maritime law from the harsher standards that govern many land-based injuries. In a number of states, a worker assigned more than half the fault takes home nothing. Here, the rule worked the way it was meant to: the defense’s blame strategy reduced the number, but it could not take the recovery away.

A career’s worth of harm, valued element by element.

The jury did not lump the harm into a single number. It worked through each element the law allows for an injured seaman — physical pain and mental anguish, lost earning capacity, physical impairment, disfigurement, and future medical care — and valued each one for both the past and the future.

The largest piece, by far, was future lost earning capacity. That is the signature of a serious offshore injury: it does not just cost a worker a few shifts, it takes away the ability to keep doing the job at all. Valuing that future loss correctly, with credible economic proof, is where the most money in a case like this is won or lost. Added together, the jury’s answers came to a gross of $3,665,420 before the comparative-fault reduction.

— Paraphrasing the court’s charge to the jury on the Jones Act standard of causation.