Ships and shipowners

This is bread and butter stuff. We receive a constant stream of requests for information about ships and shipowners, although all our lawyers worldwide have access to the necessary tools and many of them do use them regularly themselves.

Perhaps the most frequent enquiry is “who owns this ship”? This is not always as straightforward as the layman might think! There are many different kinds of ownership, but the most important is the beneficial owner. The beneficial owner is the person or company with the right to sell or dispose of a ship or to transfer shares in a ship. It is important to use a source that provides this information. Registered owner and managers are also important. Often the lawyer will also need to have details of the entire fleet of the shipowner in question. The physical characteristics of the ship may be needed. What sort of ship is it? What tonnage? As well as a host of related information. The P&I Club with which the ship is entered will be essential. And, as often as not, the lawyer will want not only the latest information, but the facts at a specific point in the past as well.

Hard copy sources include Lloyd's Register of Ships, which is particularly strong on physical characteristics. This is another long-standing publication, established in 1764. It is published annually by Lloyd's Register Fairplay. It provides information on all sea-going, self-propelled merchant ships of 100 GT and above. Not cheap at £1,100 for the current three-volume set, it provides an excellent reference source when a collection is built up over a number of years. As an annual publication, it is inevitably out of date when it arrives with a very heavy thud on your desk, but every purchase also includes Shipfinder Online, an internet service providing updates to the information contained in the bound volumes.

A companion volume to Lloyd's Register of Ships is Lloyd's List of Shipowners and Managers, also published annually. It is a much slimmer single volume, at a third of the price, concentrating on ownership information without all the additional details of the ship itself.

The other hard copy source which is considered a “must have” is Lloyd's Confidential Index. This is published by Lloyd's MIU, a division of Informa PLC. Its strength has always been the inclusion of details of the beneficial owner. It is published twice a year and costs a breathtaking £2,400. Like Lloyd's Register of Ships, it has a long-established history, dating back to 1886. It covers rather fewer vessels than Lloyd's Register of Ships, but those omitted will generally be smaller ships of less interest to large commercial firms.

Hard copy cannot compete with online sources where ships and shipowners are concerned because it is vital to have the very latest information. There are a number of options almost, if not quite, “to suit every pocket”.

At the bottom end, EQUASIS is free, and you can't get much cheaper than that! It is an internet service developed by the European Commission and the French Maritime Administration. Its main objective is to reduce sub-standard shipping, so it concentrates on safety-related information. Registration is required, but there is no charge. It does not produce new information on ships; rather it collates information from public authorities and industry organisations and makes it accessible on a single platform. Ship characteristics and ship management information are the two main parts of the ship record on EQUASIS. Although it in no way compares with the sophisticated systems which I describe below, it is my view that it's not at all bad for free.

The heavyweights in online shipping information are:

• • Lloyd's MIU

• • SeaWay

• • Lloyd's Register Fairplay Internet Ships Register

• • SeaWeb

The first two are from the Lloyd's MIU stable, and the latter two from Lloyd's Register Fairplay. I shall not mention the entire capability of each service, since I am concentrating here on the frequent enquiries outlined above.

Lloyd's MIU was previously known as Seasearcher (and the same confusion reigns over the name as does for LNB and its services of the same name). It includes information on vessels and companies. The cost of the service depends on what information you subscribe to and how many licences you obtain. It lists every vessel over 99 gt. It includes details of beneficial owners.

SeaWay is a CD service that can be networked. The data derives from Lloyd's Confidential Index and it is updated every four weeks. As well as a series of standard reports, there is also a very sophisticated advanced search facility which enables a user to build his own report using as many criteria as he needs. It was designed in partnership with British Marine Managers Ltd. There is also an internet version if currency is an issue.

Lloyd's Register Fairplay Internet Ships Register (ISR) is a service covering commercial ships over 299 gt and their owners, operators, managers and builders. The ISR may be considered the economy service, whilst SeaWeb is the more sophisticated offering. Both are effectively online versions of Lloyd's Register of Ships, with SeaWeb covering a greater number of ships (100 gt and above). Both provide information on ships, companies and shipbuilders and SeaWeb has a greater number of optional extras.

Casualties and detentions

The shipping lawyer will also require information on vessel casualties, whether they are major collisions that hit the headlines, or just scrapes. If he can get this information in “real time” this will give him a definite edge. Under the Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control, when deficiencies are found during inspection of a ship, it may be detained until the deficiencies are rectified. The maritime lawyer needs to be aware of this, and will often ask for details of what the deficiencies were.

For those to whom the information isn't crucial, the old-fashioned hard copy sources may suffice. The Lloyd's List newspaper provides a casualty report towards the back of the paper each day, in vessel name order. It also includes other relevant information, for example details of ship arrests.

Lloyd's Casualty Week is effectively a weekly cumulation of the information in Lloyd's List. It was once issued in hard copy and magnificent bound volumes still grace our library shelves. It is now emailed every Friday as a pdf.

If the need for this information is time critical, an online service is a better resource. Lloyd's MIU and SeaWeb both cover this area. Lloyd's MIU also offers Lloyd's Casualty Reporting Service, under which they email subscribers details of marine casualties as they happen. Subscribers can specify their own criteria for this, e.g. casualties occurring in a certain part of the world, or casualties to ships sailing under a particular flag. Emails are usually received within hours of the occurrence of the incident.

Ship movements

The need to know the latest whereabouts of a ship is invariably the result of a lawyer anticipating its arrest on behalf of a client. It is also sometimes necessary to establish the trading pattern of a ship, in order to anticipate its next port of call. A historical record of a ship's movements is often of use when trying to prove the location of a vessel at a particular point in time.

There are hard copy publications on the market, for example Lloyd's Shipping Index, which is a weekly publication. But anyone serious about finding a vessel really needs an online service. Lloyd's MIU and SeaWeb both offer movements data. In recent years, both have added Automatic Identification System (AIS) functionality, which makes the location of a vessel a much more precise operation. Ships transmit a signal which is picked up on a receiver and transferred to the system. Subscribers can note the location of the vessel and even pin point it on a map, where it can be viewed in the context of other vessels in the locality. We have come a long way from ringing up the harbour master and asking him if he wouldn't mind looking out of the window!

A lawyer unwilling or unable to check one of these systems for himself every day can use a vessel tracking service - or ask the Library to do it for him! Generally a lawyer will require monitoring of the entire fleet of a particular shipowner, not just a single vessel. At HFW we normally have a list of over 100 vessels at any one time, which we monitor on a daily basis. This is made a simple process by a facility on the service to which we subscribe which means we don't have to enter each vessel individually every time. There are also several commercial providers, such as Dynamar (from the Netherlands), Infospectrum and Lloyd's MIU.

International conventions

Because of the international nature of shipping law, international conventions inevitably feature strongly in the shipping lawyer's arsenal. Requests in the library for conventions outstrip those for national legislation. Many conventions stem from the work of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), a body devoted to shipping matters. The IMO was established in 1958 and one of its functions was declared to be the development of new conventions. It is now responsible for nearly 50 international conventions and agreements, particularly in the areas of maritime safety, pollution, liability and compensation. Amongst the most well-known are the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea 1974 (SOLAS), the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972 (COLREGs) and the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships 1973, as amended by the Protocol of 1978 (MARPOL 73/78). Conventions laying down regimes for the limitation of liability for maritime claims are of particular importance, e.g. the Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims 1976 (LLMC) (another IMO Convention) and the Hague and Hague Visby Rules.

Probably the most frequent request in relation to international conventions, apart from the text itself, is whether or not a particular country is party to the convention. The Ratification of Maritime Conventions is a four volume loose-leaf work published by LLP with the Institute of Maritime Law, University of Southampton, in consultation with the International Maritime Organisation. This work answers these questions adequately. It is also the only comprehensive source I am aware of that provides the date a convention came into force at a national level, as well as internationally. Although the title contains the word “maritime”, the coverage of the work is actually rather wider than this, since it also includes conventions on jurisdiction, arbitration and enforcement, even where there is no direct connection with shipping. There are only two service issues each year, but subscriptions are accompanied by a telephone and fax service to the Institute of Maritime law.

The Ratification of Maritime Conventions is also contained on i-Law, which is a much better medium for this sort of information. Regrettably the contents are no more current than the hard copy.

The other main hard copy source is Benedict on Admiralty. The complete work is 31 loose leaf volumes, but it is possible to subscribe to the four treaties volumes on their own. They reproduce the text of conventions together with tables of ratifications and accessions.

Other online sources of information for international conventions include the IMO website (www.imo.org) where there is a useful downloadable spreadsheet of the status of conventions by country. The site does not provide the full text of all the conventions. Another useful service is regs4ships, which was set up in 2001 to provide digital regulations, technical information and IMO material to ships and the shore infrastructure. It provides the texts of a number of conventions, such as SOLAS, MARPOL, etc, but does not maintain details of parties to the conventions. (This service also provides UK and EU legislation relating to shipping and a number of other relevant documents).

Standard shipping forms

Like any other lawyer, the shipping practitioner needs a range of forms in connection with his work. In the shipping industry, there are a number of proprietary forms that are in common use. The general services like the Encyclopaedia of Forms & Precedents, whilst containing some shipping forms, are not very strong in this area. There is a need to use more specialised sources which can offer a range of bills of lading, charterparties, marine insurance forms and the like. Sometimes the need is simply to examine the text of the form, rather than using it as a working document. In these cases hard copy sources like Benedict on Admiralty come into their own. There are four volumes on carriage of goods by sea which can be purchased separately from the rest of the set. The carriage of goods volumes reprint a wide selection of charterparties, divided into type, e.g. bareboat, grain, tanker. There are a number of other shipping documents included, such as bills of lading, towage and salvage contracts, shipbuilding contracts, ship sale contracts, etc.

The other hard copy source which I would recommend for shipping forms is Forms of Approved Documents published by BIMCO. This contains specimen forms of all BIMCO approved charterparties, bills of lading, waybills, management agreements, contracts of affreightment, wreck removal contracts, bareboat charters and other shipping documents, plus the wording of 75 standard clauses. It is published in an A4 ring binder and the subscription includes updates for a year.

i-Law has recently added a range of pdf shipping forms to its maritime and commercial service. These include the usual charterparties etc as well as the range of Admiralty Court forms. Regrettably, they cannot be used as working documents due to the format.

Sometimes the lawyer will need a form to actually put into use in connection with his client work. There is not much available on the market, the only comprehensive online service coming once again from BIMCO, which they have called idea. This is a document editing application which carries a selection of over 70 standard shipping documents which can be edited and saved online. The application uses Microsoft Word, but the procedures for using the system are rather convoluted. Once completed, the user saves the document, but it remains on the BIMCO server. Strict security is in place to reassure the lawyer that documents are safe from the outside world. Completed documents are e-mailed to your pre-registered e-mail address in the form of a pdf-file. The document may then be distributed by e-mail to the relevant parties. If the user needs to edit the document he must go back online and repeat the process again. The system uses a “pay as you go” print system so that users only pay for the documents they produce. Working copies, watermarked as such (as opposed to final copies) are free of charge, although there is a small annual subscription in addition to the charges for the documents.