Who Are the Best Defense Base Act Attorneys in Maryland?
Maryland’s Defense Base Act work concentrates in a few firms with a genuine footing in this federal and Longshore practice: Grossman Attorneys at Law, led by Howard S. Grossman; Gilman & Bedigian in Timonium; and WGK Personal Injury Lawyers in Baltimore. The state’s aerospace and defense sector runs to $46.4 billion in economic activity across 12,475 businesses, and the civilian specialists it sends abroad fall under the Act when they are hurt.
The field is narrow because a Defense Base Act claim is not, in the end, a Maryland matter. The Act extends the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act and runs on its machinery, so a contested claim never reaches the Maryland Workers’ Compensation Commission. It is decided inside the U.S. Department of Labor: the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs takes the filing, a district director holds an informal conference, the Office of Administrative Law Judges hears a disputed claim, and the Benefits Review Board reviews the result. The firms below earned their place by working that federal track as routine rather than as unfamiliar ground. The criteria come after the list.
The Best Defense Base Act Lawyers in Maryland (Updated 2026)
1. Grossman Attorneys at Law – Howard S. Grossman
The firm at the head of the list has taken hundreds of Defense Base Act claims through the U.S. Department of Labor, a volume of federal work a general Maryland injury office cannot match. Grossman Attorneys runs that practice nationally from offices in Florida and Washington, D.C., and represents injured contractors wherever an assignment sent them and wherever they have since settled, which for this workforce is seldom the same place. (No affiliation.)
Its fee posture is built for these claims: the employer or its carrier pays the attorney’s fee, never a percentage of the worker’s benefits, so the firm shoulders the financial risk of pressing a disputed claim. Behind that posture is a lawyer the field knows well. In more than forty years of practice Howard S. Grossman has earned an AV Preeminent peer rating from Martindale-Hubbell and repeated Florida Super Lawyers recognition in plaintiff personal injury, and Scott L. Thaler and Callie J. Fixelle sit with him on the Defense Base Act docket. The firm came up through maritime, offshore, and Longshore practice, the body of law the Act is grafted onto, and that grounding shows in an OWCP conference or a hearing before an administrative law judge.
The published record points the same way: an extensive Defense Base Act library, a working claims FAQ, and current contractor statistics, the output of a practice for which these claims are the core work rather than a rare file. For a client base scattered across many countries, the firm works in English, Spanish, Creole, French, Russian, and Ukrainian.
2. Gilman & Bedigian
The resident option, for a contractor who wants counsel inside Maryland, is Gilman & Bedigian, which keeps its principal office in Timonium just north of Baltimore and runs additional offices in Pennsylvania and Texas. The firm is known first as a Maryland plaintiff injury and medical malpractice practice, and it maintains a dedicated Defense Base Act page for civilian contractors hurt while working for the U.S. military abroad.
The breadth is worth stating plainly. Defense Base Act work is one of several areas the firm handles rather than the whole of its practice, so a contractor does well to ask how many of these federal claims the office has actually taken through the Department of Labor. What it offers is a resident Maryland footprint and the plaintiff-side habits of a trial practice: it appears for injured people and their families, not for employers or carriers, and it can sit across a table from a Baltimore-area client rather than work the file by teleconference alone.
3. WGK Personal Injury Lawyers
Baltimore supplies the third choice, a claimant firm with a genuine maritime side. WGK Personal Injury Lawyers has represented people hurt in maritime accidents for more than forty years and names the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act among the federal claims it takes, always for the injured worker and never the employer or carrier.
The Port of Baltimore is why that matters here. The Longshore Act covers the dockworkers and harbor employees who work the port, and it is the same statute the Defense Base Act extends, so a firm at home in the Department of Labor’s Longshore process already knows the machinery a contractor’s claim runs through. Maritime injury sits inside a broader personal injury practice rather than serving as the headline, so a contractor should ask directly about the firm’s Defense Base Act experience before signing.
How the Maryland Firms Compare
| Firm | Main Offices | DBA and Longshore Focus | Experience | Distinction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grossman Attorneys at Law | Florida and Washington, D.C.; national | DBA, Longshore, maritime | 40+ years (Howard S. Grossman) | AV Preeminent; Florida Super Lawyers |
| Gilman & Bedigian | Timonium, Maryland (plus PA and TX) | DBA, claimant side | Not stated | Dedicated Defense Base Act practice page |
| WGK Personal Injury Lawyers | Baltimore, Maryland | LHWCA and maritime | 40+ years (maritime) | Port of Baltimore maritime and Longshore practice |
How We Chose These Firms
This ranking is independent editorial judgment, unpaid, and its author holds no professional or financial tie to any firm named on it. Placement reflects that judgment and no outside body’s ranking. Six things carried the most weight, each chosen because it bears on how one of these claims actually turns out:
- A real Defense Base Act or Longshore practice with demonstrable depth behind it, not a single landing page bolted onto a general injury shop.
- Fluency in the Longshore Act the Defense Base Act extends, since these claims are resolved through the OWCP, the administrative law judges, and the Benefits Review Board rather than a state commission.
- Experience measured two ways, in years at the work and in the count of these particular claims a firm has carried.
- The reach to represent a contractor wherever the assignment took them, in the language they speak, because this workforce is spread across the globe.
- A fee arrangement built for the Act, where the employer or carrier pays the attorney and nothing is drawn from the worker’s benefits.
- A willingness to litigate, because a carrier weighs a claim differently once it expects to meet the firm at a hearing.
No firm above is credited with a board certification in Defense Base Act law, because the field has none to grant.
Ranking Sources
This list was assembled from each firm’s own Defense Base Act, Longshore, and maritime practice materials, Martindale-Hubbell peer ratings, Maryland and Florida bar records, published client reviews, and the U.S. Department of Labor’s OWCP resources on the Longshore and Defense Base Acts.
Maryland’s Intelligence Corridor and the Contractors It Sends Abroad
Maryland’s tie to overseas contract work does not run through troop deployments the way it does in a training state. It runs through a corridor of intelligence, cyber, and weapons-development work that sends engineers and analysts abroad from a desk or a laboratory bench, and it is dense enough that an injured Maryland contractor usually has real local options for a federal claim.
Maryland’s intelligence and testing installations
The anchor sits between Baltimore and Washington. Fort George G. Meade is the headquarters of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, the center of the government’s signals-intelligence and cyber-operations work, and it drew a dense ring of contractors into the surrounding corridor to support that mission at home and overseas. Aberdeen Proving Ground, to the northeast, hosts the Army’s C5ISR Center, the command’s laboratory for command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, with more than 1.4 million square feet of laboratory space. Joint Base Andrews, southeast of the capital, is home to Air Force One and the 89th Airlift Wing, which moves national leadership and cargo to postings around the world. The civilians who follow that work abroad are the ones the Defense Base Act was written for, and the harm that comes home with them, the blast and burn injuries from hostile zones and the respiratory illness traced to burn pits, is what a Defense Base Act practice is built to carry.
Maryland’s defense contractors
The companies that staff those missions sit on the same ground. Lockheed Martin keeps its corporate headquarters in Bethesda. Northrop Grumman runs its Mission Systems sector from Linthicum, near Baltimore, one of the company’s largest sites and part of a Maryland workforce the state puts near 12,900. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, is a Navy-sponsored university affiliated research center that develops advanced systems for national defense. Behind those names is a sector the state counted, in 2023, at 12,475 aerospace and defense businesses generating $46.4 billion in economic activity and drawing $18.3 billion in federal contracts, with fifteen of the world’s twenty largest aerospace and defense firms holding a presence in the state.
The Port of Baltimore and the Longshore bench
Maryland has a working maritime side as well. The Port of Baltimore keeps a steady population of dockworkers and ship repairers covered by the Longshore Act, the statute the Defense Base Act is built on, which is why the Maryland bar carries lawyers fluent in that federal procedure. For claims purposes, a Maryland resident’s Defense Base Act matter is administered through the Department of Labor’s Eastern compensation district and handled from its Philadelphia office, and a lawyer who already knows that office and its procedure holds a quiet practical edge for a contractor filing from home.
Where the Federal Claim Leaves Maryland Workers’ Compensation Behind
A Maryland contractor who has been through a state workers’ compensation claim tends to assume the Defense Base Act works on the same terms. It does not, and the difference is not academic.
The first split is jurisdiction. A Defense Base Act claim is federal. It is filed with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, not the Maryland Workers’ Compensation Commission, which means different forms, different deadlines, an administrative law judge in place of a state commissioner, and a federal appeal path.
The second is the money, and here the two systems diverge sharply. Maryland caps its benefits. For injuries on or after January 1, 2023, the state’s maximum weekly compensation rate is $1,402, rising to $1,493 in 2025, and permanent partial disability in the ordinary case is limited to 500 weeks of payments. The Defense Base Act runs on a different scale: compensation is figured on the national average weekly wage within federal statutory limits, certain benefits carry annual cost-of-living adjustments, and medical care tied to the injury is not cut off by any predetermined duration. For a serious permanent injury, the ceiling a Maryland claim would reach is not the ceiling a federal one does.
The third is reach. The injury may have happened on another continent, and the medical record may be scattered across two or three of them, yet the claim is still decided through federal channels. A claim that looks straightforward can be denied or delayed when it is worked as though the familiar state rules applied, which is the practical reason these claims reward a lawyer who knows the federal track.
How to Choose a Defense Base Act Lawyer in Maryland
A handful of questions separates a firm that does this work from one that would be learning on the file:
- Ask how many Defense Base Act claims the firm has carried through the Department of Labor, and whether it has argued one before an administrative law judge rather than settling every matter.
- Find out who handles the file from day to day, the named attorney or a case team, and how the firm keeps a client informed from overseas or a distant time zone.
- Confirm the languages the office can work in, since this workforce is drawn from many countries.
- Get the fee arrangement in writing. Under the Act the attorney’s fee is generally the carrier’s responsibility once benefits are secured, not a cut of the worker’s compensation.
- For a Baltimore-area or port-related injury, ask specifically about the firm’s Longshore Act experience, because that is the procedure a Defense Base Act claim follows.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is covered by the Defense Base Act?
Civilian contractors working abroad under U.S. government contracts for military, national-defense, or public-works purposes fall within the Act, including those on overseas bases and with welfare organizations serving the armed forces. What matters is the work, not the passport, so qualifying foreign, local, and third-country nationals are covered on the same terms as U.S. citizens.
How long does a Maryland contractor have to file a Defense Base Act claim?
Maryland changes none of the federal clock. The employer must have written notice within thirty days, and Form LS-203 must reach the Department of Labor within a year of the injury or the last compensation payment, with two years allowed for an occupational disease dated from the diagnosis that links it to the work. A missed deadline can defeat even a strong claim, so the date deserves early attention.
What does a Defense Base Act lawyer cost in Maryland?
Nothing changes hands from the worker in the usual case. Under the Act the employer or its insurance carrier pays the attorney’s fee once benefits are secured, and a fee measured as a percentage of the claimant’s compensation is not allowed, so what the lawyer is paid never comes out of the award.
What benefits does the Defense Base Act pay?
The Act starts with medical coverage: all reasonable and necessary treatment for the injury, the worker free to choose an authorized treating physician. Disability compensation follows at roughly two-thirds of the average weekly wage, kept within federal limits and paid as temporary, permanent, partial, or total. Death and burial benefits go to surviving dependents, vocational rehabilitation is available, and pain and suffering is excluded.
Where are Defense Base Act claims for Maryland residents handled?
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, through its Division of Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation, oversees them. Maryland falls in the Eastern compensation district, and its claims are worked out of the Philadelphia office. A contested matter runs from an informal conference before the district director to a hearing before an administrative law judge, then to the Benefits Review Board, and finally to a federal court of appeals.
What is the zone of special danger?
This Defense Base Act doctrine can reach an injury that happens away from actual duties. Life on an overseas assignment carries risks a job at home would not, so harm during off-hours, recreation, or a simple errand at a foreign site may still be charged to the conditions of the employment rather than dismissed as personal.
