The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently held that its two-question Doiron test for determining whether oilfield services contracts are maritime contracts also applies when evaluating the maritime-contract status of contracts for any other type of services, in Barrios v. Centaur, 942 F.3d 670 (5th Cir. 2019). This decision is important for any company working in the Gulf of Mexico because it simplifies the maritime-contract classification process for their undertakings. Because Doiron is no longer read to be limited to oilfield service contracts, entities such as offshore construction and decommissioning companies, whose service contracts could not always be neatly characterized as “facilitat[ing] the drilling and production of oil and gas,” should have an easier time qualifying their contracts as maritime contracts. It should also enable contracting parties to better assess their maritime or non-maritime status when entering into a service contract because the tests are relatively clear and are not reliant on after-the-fact tort considerations. This clarity is especially important for any type of company working in the Gulf of Mexico, where the maritime or non-maritime status of a contract could determine the governing law. Notably, a non-maritime contract governing services in the Gulf could be subject to Louisiana and Texas’ construction and oilfield anti-indemnity statutes, which could make the contract’s key risk allocation provisions unenforceable.

  1. The In re Larry Doiron decision established a reasonable test for determining whether oilfield service contracts constitute maritime contracts, but it did not expressly address other types of contracts.

In 2018, the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in Doiron, 879 F.3d 568, 576 (5th Cir. 2018) (en banc), which greatly simplified the standards for assessing when an oilfield service contract is a maritime contract. In doing so, it rejected the nearly 30-year old test of Davis & Sons v. Gulf Oil, which instructed courts to consider six tort-law factors in determining whether an oilfield service contract constituted a maritime contract. The Davis & Sons factors required courts to consider the unique facts of the incident giving rise to the claim under the relevant contract, not what the parties envisioned at the time of signing the contract. Courts applying Davis & Sons also had to evaluate the contract in light of prior court decisions that had classified certain types of service contracts as non-maritime contracts.