Run Every Maritime Matter, Arrest, and Claim From One File Without Dropping the Ball

Maritime work rarely sits still. A single charterparty dispute can pull in a vessel in one jurisdiction, a charterer in another, and a P&I club in a third, all while the limitation clock runs.

Keep casework and billing connected

When the matter file lives in one spreadsheet, the arrest action in an email chain, and the time entries in yet another sheet, the connection between the casework and what the client owes you starts to fray. HelloGrowthCRM keeps the matter, its arrests, its claims, and its billing on a single client record, so the whole life of an instruction is visible to every fee earner working it.

An arrest is a high-stakes, time-bound action, and a missed security deadline can undo weeks of work. HelloGrowthCRM gives each arrest a record tied to the vessel, the port, and a clear stage — application, arrested, security posted, or released.

See every action at a glance

Instead of asking three colleagues where an action stands, the team sees which vessels are held, where security is still outstanding, and which actions have closed, all in one place.

Claims notified to a club have their own rhythm and their own deadlines, and a claim that sits un-progressed is a claim that can be prejudiced. HelloGrowthCRM turns each notification into a record carrying the club, the claim type, and the amount, and tracks it from notified through review to settlement or declinature.

Nothing drifts past a time bar

The team sees open exposure and settled value at a glance, so nothing drifts past a club's time bar.

In a busy maritime practice the most common leak is not lost cases but lost time — hours worked under pressure and never recorded, then written off at the month's end. HelloGrowthCRM ties every time entry to a matter and a fee earner and carries it from unbilled to invoiced to paid.

Turn recovered time into revenue

Surfacing unbilled hours and invoices awaiting payment turns recovered time into real revenue without adding administrative weight.

Maritime firms run lean relative to the value they protect, and context lost between partners, associates, and the billing team is where margin disappears.

One shared history for the whole firm

HelloGrowthCRM gives everyone the same record — matters, arrests, claims, and billing on one client file — so a strategy call, an urgent arrest, and a fee discussion all draw on the same history. That shared truth is what lets an admiralty practice carry more matters without losing grip on any of them.

Much of a maritime practice's contentious work never sees a courtroom — it goes to arbitration under the clause in the charterparty, whether that points to London, Singapore, or another seat. Each dispute carries its own procedural skeleton: the notice of claim, the appointment of arbitrators, submissions on a tribunal timetable, and the award. HelloGrowthCRM records the seat, rules, and tribunal on the matter, and turns each procedural deadline into a task with an owner.

Demurrage, off-hire, and the claims that arrive in batches

A single charterer client can generate a stream of demurrage claims across a year of fixtures, each with laytime calculations, statements of facts, and notices of readiness to marshal — and each with a short contractual bar requiring the claim and its full supporting documents within a fixed number of days of discharge. When those claims live as separate email threads, the batch is unmanageable; when each is a record on the client's file with its documents checklist and its bar date, the fee earner works through them in order of expiry rather than order of arrival. Off-hire disputes and bunker quality claims follow the same pattern: fact-heavy, deadline-bound, and far easier to run when the surveyor's report, the correspondence, and the clock all sit on one record.

Maritime claims die on dates more often than they die on merits. The one-year bar on cargo claims, the short contractual bars on demurrage, the limitation periods that differ by jurisdiction and claim type, and the extensions negotiated with the other side — every one of them is a date that must be watched by someone, and in many firms that someone is a single senior clerk with a diary. HelloGrowthCRM makes the time-bar diary a shared, structured asset: each matter carries its bar dates, each extension is logged with who granted it and the new expiry, and escalating reminders reach both the fee earner and a supervising partner as a date approaches.

Extensions are records, not emails

An extension agreed by email and never centrally logged is a professional-negligence claim waiting to mature. Logging each extension against the matter — with the correspondence attached — means the current bar date on the record is always the true one, and a fee earner picking up a colleague's file inherits the real deadline rather than the original one.

No maritime matter is run alone. A cargo claim at a discharge port involves the P&I club's claims handler, the club's local correspondent, a cargo surveyor appointed within hours, the ship's agent, and sometimes an average adjuster — before opposing counsel even appears. HelloGrowthCRM treats these as first-class contacts linked to the matters they act on, so the firm can see at a glance which surveyor was used at which port, which correspondent handled the last arrest in that jurisdiction, and which club handler is across the client's open claims.

Institutional memory that survives departures

When the partner who “knows everyone in that port” retires or moves firms, the network usually leaves too. Keeping counterparties, correspondents, and experts on the matter records turns personal memory into firm memory — the next fee earner instructing a surveyor in an unfamiliar port starts from the firm's history, not from zero.

Tuesday, 05:40: a shipowner client calls — cargo damage alleged at the discharge port and receivers threatening arrest. The intake takes four minutes: matter opened against the existing client record, vessel and voyage details captured, conflict note logged. By 07:00, the P&I club's correspondent at the port and a cargo surveyor are instructed, both linked to the matter. By midday the arrest threat crystallises; the arrest record opens at stage “application” with the security demand noted, and the client receives a WhatsApp update summarising the position — the first of several sent from the matter rather than typed from scratch. Thursday: security is agreed by way of a club letter of undertaking; the arrest record moves to “security posted” and the vessel sails. The time-bar diary now shows the one-year cargo bar on the claim, and the surveyor's report lands on the record when it arrives. Over the following months, every time entry — the dawn calls, the correspondence, the settlement negotiation — accrues against the matter, moving from unbilled to invoiced without a month-end reconstruction. When the claim settles, the file shows the whole story in order: instruction, response, security, evidence, negotiation, settlement, and a fully billed matter. The next urgent call from the same client starts from that history.