Marler & Associates
A Specialty Practice in Maritime and Related Law

Marler & Associates is equipped and specifically designed to render service at the specialist level in every category included within the discipline, including: claims in respect of bills of lading and charterparties, disputes arising from charterparties, arbitration, collisions and related casualties, oil spills and environmental disasters, personal injury, salvage, towage, freight forwarding and customs broking; contracts relative to cargo shipments, charterparties, documentary letters of credit, agency, shipbuilding, ship repairing, towage, terminals and warehousing.

The firm is proud to serve ship owners, charterers, underwriters, P&I Clubs, ship-brokers, managers and agents, stevedores, terminal operators and warehousemen, ship suppliers, shipbuilders and ship repairers, customs brokers and freight forwarders, importers and exporters. In addition, it numbers amongst its friends referring law firms from around the world.

Our lawyers are selected either from within the firm or from associated firms. Practicing customarily in maritime matters before the Federal Court of Canada, the firm is qualified to handle, plead and supervise cases in any part of the country and for these purposes maintains corresponding relationships with firms in every major port and city of the country. The firm also has a competence in administrative, commercial, general and civil law and is thus equipped to handle a general range of clientele and mandates

Fees depend either upon a specific fee structure pre-arranged with the client, which can include a contingency fee arrangement, or, alternatively, upon an assessment of a number of factors including: degree of complexity of the matter, urgency with which the work was required, amount at issue, result achieved, etc. All mandates are under the supervision of David Marler but will be handled at appropriate fee levels including senior, intermediate, junior and/or para-legal rates.

David Marler is perhaps best known within Canadian juridical circles as the lawyer who pleaded successfully before the Supreme Court of Canada the three cases - the "Buenos Aires Maru", 1986; "Chartwell", 1989; "Monk", 1991 (known informally as "the trilogy") - that define the constitutional and legal parameters of Canadian maritime law, the degree to which that law is federal or provincial, the jurisdiction of the Federal Court of Canada in maritime matters, and the validity of non-responsibility and restrictive liability clauses in contracts pertaining to the carriage of goods by sea.