The Federal Maritime Commission published Samsung Electronics America‘s complaint against Wan Hai Lines on May 26, 2026 — Samsung’s sixth FMC filing against an ocean carrier since 2022. The operational lesson worth pulling from this litigation arc lives in the two cases already decided. In April and May 2025, Samsung went into Initial Decisions against ZIM and SM Line with nearly $30 million in combined claims and recovered $5.6 million — about 19%. Both rulings landed on the same standard: container-by-container cause attribution is what determines whether a D&D claim holds up.
What “container-by-container” actually requires
Both Initial Decisions name the same evidentiary requirement: a contested D&D charge has to be tied to a specific carrier action at the time it accrued, container by container. Chief Administrative Law Judge Erin Wirth, ruling on the ZIM case on April 22, 2025, walked through what that means in practice. To defend or contest any D&D charge, she explained, you have to verify a chain of conditions at the container level for each disputed day — that the carrier made the container available, that a trucker was available, that chassis were available, that the port was open, that the consignee had appointments and staff to unload, and that an empty-return appointment was findable. Sorting out responsibility, Wirth wrote, means “reviewing emails and evidence regarding the cause of delay for each container.”
In the SM Line ruling 36 days later, ALJ Mary Hervey applied the same standard. SM Line’s defense made it central, arguing that Samsung’s expert had not done “the container-by-container analysis required by ALJ precedent” to establish either liability or damages. Samsung’s expert acknowledged at deposition he had not reviewed shipments on a case-by-case basis.
Why even Samsung’s evidence fell short
The two rulings show what kind of documentation it takes to win even part of a claim — and how much can fall short of the standard.
In the ZIM case, the parties exchanged over 200,000 pages of documents, deposed 13 fact witnesses, ran multiple expert witnesses, and filed briefs with over 11,000 pages of exhibits. The disputed charges totaled 9,984 separate demurrage and detention assessments on 2,980 containers from July 2019 to December 2022. Samsung established that ZIM’s multiple cargo holds — imposed during four collection-pressure periods between August 2020 and March 2022 — were unreasonable practices violating 46 U.S.C. § 41102(c). That finding carried a $3,680,339 award.
What Samsung did not establish was the broader claim that ZIM’s store-door D&D billing pattern was unreasonable. Judge Wirth found that Samsung had not produced evidence sufficient to determine which specific charges were ZIM’s fault, given that some charges were due to Samsung’s customers being unable to accept deliveries, and given that the record didn’t clearly show which charges had been waived in contemporaneous negotiation between the parties.
The SM Line case followed the same pattern at higher cost. Samsung disputed 18,186 charges and sought $14.5 million in direct damages plus $2.6 million in additional damages. The ALJ found only 115 of those 18,186 alleged charges to be unreasonably assessed — about 0.6% — and the $1,913,355.80 award reflects damages tied to those 115 charges. Both Initial Decisions are on appeal. Samsung and ZIM each filed Exceptions to the ZIM ruling; both parties filed Exceptions to the SM Line ruling in June 2025. Commission review is pending in both cases.
Samsung’s six FMC complaints, at a glance
All six Samsung complaints allege the same core pattern: store-door / carrier-haulage shipments where the carrier was responsible for ocean plus inland transportation, then billed Samsung when the inland leg delayed. Here’s the picture as of late May 2026:
| Carrier | Docket | Filed | Scale alleged | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZIM | 22-30 | Oct 2022 | 9,984 charges / 2,980 containers / ~$12.2M sought | Initial Decision April 2025: $3.68M awarded. Both parties filed Exceptions; Commission review pending |
| SM Line | 23-01 | April 2023 | 18,186 charges / ~$17.1M sought | Initial Decision May 2025: $1.91M awarded. Both parties filed Exceptions June 2025; Commission review pending |
| COSCO | 24-16 | March 2024 | 5,000+ demurrage + 17,000+ detention charges | Procedural rulings ongoing; COSCO third-party complaint against Samsung Electronics Co. partially active |
| OOCL | 24-17 | March 2024 | 4,400+ charges since 2021 | Commission Remand Order July 2025 on OOCL counterclaim |
| HMM | 24-23 | June 2024 | 96,000 charges (Samsung’s largest filing) | Initial decision target was June 2025; final status not publicly confirmed |
| Wan Hai | 26-06 | May 2026 | Not yet public | Initial decision May 20, 2027; final December 3, 2027 |
Every complaint alleges 46 U.S.C. § 41102(c) violations. Samsung’s earlier complaints alleged broader violations under § 41102(d) and § 41104(a). The Wan Hai filing is narrower than the earlier filings, claiming only § 41102(c) and 46 CFR 545.4 and 545.5.
Where the same standard applies
Two things are worth being clear about. First, the Samsung cases are specifically about store-door / carrier-haulage shipments — service contracts where the carrier handles ocean plus inland. Most BCO and forwarder D&D exposure is on merchant haulage, where the shipper or forwarder arranges inland transport, and won’t follow the same legal pattern.
Second, the documentation standard applies far beyond FMC complaints. The FMC’s May 2024 billing rule requires shippers to dispute D&D charges inside a 30-day window with specific information attached. Carrier portal disputes and tariff negotiations turn on the same evidentiary question Judge Wirth asked Samsung: can you tie this specific charge to a specific carrier action at the time it occurred? Container-level cause attribution requires timestamped event records of carrier actions as they happen, captured in a single timeline that can be matched against any invoice line.
What Samsung couldn’t fully establish — container-level event records pinning specific charges to specific carrier actions — is the same evidence base any operational team needs for D&D disputes today. If your team is reconstructing those timelines from email threads and carrier portal screenshots, see how multi-carrier milestone tracking consolidates the data in one view.
Wan Hai‘s 26-06 won’t see an Initial Decision until May 2027. FMC complaints are a downstream remedy on a multi-year clock. The upstream work — recording each carrier action against the specific container it affected — is what determines whether any future dispute holds up.
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