Free for a Fee

If I didn’t practice Internet law, I might have chosen maritime law. Their disputes are often interesting. This particular case sounds like a movie plotline. AdvanFort provides armed guards to ships worried about piracy (the real kind…you know, on the ocean). The Indian government accused the crew of one of these ships of violating their Arms Act (i.e., arms running), so it threw the crew in jail. To help get the crew released, AdvanFort retained John A.C. Cartner as one of its lawyers. AdvanFort and Cartner then had a falling out over a fee dispute, which led to an arbitration and a pending bar complaint against Cartner. Cartner subsequently published an online article critical of his former client’s principals at The Maritime Executive website. (The article is down there, but here’s a copy of it). AdvanFort’s principals claim that Cartner’s article defamed them.