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[Amended 10/14/26] A container is dropped during discharge. A reach stacker punches a hole in a reefer. Cargo in a transit shed is damaged by water ingress, or walks off the terminal entirely. In each case the goods belong to somebody else, they were in your possession when it happened, and the cargo owner or its subrogated underwriter will be in touch. Your commercial general liability policy will not respond to any of it. That is not a gap in your program, an oversight by y

On August 21 and August 24, a specialized team of Coast Guard law enforcement officers, a vessel inspector, Coast Guard cyber protection personnel, and FBI cyber operators boarded two foreign-flagged oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. The joint statement said the boardings were designed to ensure the integrity of each vessel's operational and information technology systems following indications that their networks had been compromised by foreign cyber actors. One of the vesse

The bill of lading is the most important document in international trade and one of the few that does three unrelated jobs at once. It is a receipt for goods, evidence of the contract of carriage, and a document of title that can be bought, sold, and pledged while the cargo is still at sea. Most of the disputes that arise around it come from confusing those functions or from treating the third one as a formality. A shipper who focuses on the description of goods, a carrier wh

On September 9, a Federal Maritime Commission administrative law judge rejected Peloton Interactive's claim against Flexport in full. The company had sought $33.7 million in detention, demurrage, and storage charges accumulated during the pandemic-era supply chain disruption. It recovered nothing. The breakdown of what was claimed is instructive. Roughly $13.8 million in demurrage, $16.2 million in equipment detention, and $3.7 million in yard and warehouse storage, across th

For a terminal operator, warehouse, or forwarder, revenue can stop overnight while costs carry on. Rent, equipment leases, payroll, and financing do not pause because a fire closed your facility or a windstorm took the roof off. Business interruption coverage exists to bridge exactly that gap, and for an operation with high fixed costs it is frequently the difference between a difficult year and a closed business. It is also the coverage most often bought at the base level an