The Association is grateful to Lyons & Flood for permission to republish their legal news update. Key points The reported legal decision is beneficial to Owners and Operators, including NVOCCs, who may be shipping goods subject to the U.S. COGSA terms, as it strengthens the application of those terms and the limitations of liability that the terms set out. Lyons & Flood news update Last week a decision was issued by the Second Circuit affirming a lower court's grant of summary judgment in favor of one of our NVOCC clients. The case was captioned OOO "Garant-S" v. Empire United Lines Co., Inc. We were attorneys for the NVOCC. The decision is important because it provides further clarity for carriers regarding the applicability of COGSA's package limitation. The case involved the alleged theft of two cars while they were being stored at a NVOCC's rented warehouse prior to being loaded into a container for ocean carriage to Europe. The shipper, who was not insured, sued the NVOCC for recovery of the value of the cars and raised a plethora of arguments in order to try to avoid the application of COGSA and the package limitation to its claim. It argued that COGSA should not be applied because the theft occurred prior to the ocean carriage of the cars, and further because a bill of lading was never issued for the shipment. The shipper also alleged that the NVOCC had been somehow involved in the theft and argued that this complicity should strip the NVOCC of the COGSA package limitation defense under a theory of quasi-deviation. The shipper further argued that it had been denied a fair opportunity to declare an excess value for the cars, on the basis that the NVOCC's bill of lading lacked a space on its front to enter an excess value. In affirming the lower court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the NVOCC, finding that the package limitation was applicable, the Second Circuit established, for the first time, its support for the proposition that a bill o