LAYDAY.
Demurrage & Detention dispute support

Carriers have paid over $30 million in D&D penalties. Most importers recover almost nothing — because they can't assemble the proof in time.

LAYDAY auto-assembles the per-container evidence that wins demurrage and detention disputes, before the 30-day window closes. This is dispute-preparation support, not legal advice.

What demurrage and detention are

For a judge who has never heard the word:

Demurrage is the fee an ocean carrier charges when your full container sits at the terminal too long. Detention is the fee for keeping the carrier's empty equipment past its allowed time. Both are charged per container, per day — and importers pay them constantly, often without the records needed to contest them.

The legal hook (in force today)

Under the FMC's billing rule, 46 CFR Part 541 (effective May 28, 2024):

On Sept 23, 2025 the D.C. Circuit vacated only the "who may be billed" sub-section (§ 541.4) and left the contents requirement, the 30-day window, and the "missing info = not payable" rule in effect. The FMC conformed the CFR on Dec 29, 2025.

The money is real. The recovery is not.

These are verified FMC figures — penalties paid to the U.S. Treasury and adjudicated outcomes, not marketing estimates.

$30+ million
in FMC D&D enforcement against six carriers (penalties + overcharges, to the U.S. Treasury)
MSC $22.67M (incl. $13.1M NOR D&D overcharge) · Hapag-Lloyd $2.0M · CMA CGM $1.975M · Maersk $1.9M · ONE $1.7M · Wan Hai $950k + refunds
Honest caveat: these are civil penalties paid to the U.S. Treasury and adjudicated overcharges — not money in an importer's pocket. The only adjudicated on-the-merits billed-party recovery in the record is $580.03 (TCW v. Evergreen, Dkt 1966(I): $510 + $70.03 interest, 2025-02-13 remand). Per-invoice recovery is small; the value is aggregate and recurring.
The decisive signal: Bed Bath & Beyond lost its D&D claims.

In DK Butterfly-1 (f/k/a Bed Bath & Beyond) v. OOCL, FMC Dkt 23-02 (ALJ Initial Decision, Apr 24, 2026), the company was awarded $45,600,599.25 on its service-contract and refusal-to-deal claims — and its D&D claims were dismissed. The ALJ found "no violations… for detention and demurrage" because a sophisticated, fully-documented party could not marshal per-container proof of unreasonableness. If they couldn't assemble it, few can. That gap is the product.

We reference OOCL honestly: it is evidence of the per-container proof gap, not a claim that LAYDAY would have changed that outcome. No carrier is named here as non-compliant — only the FMC or a court makes such a determination.

What LAYDAY does

Not "find a missing field." LAYDAY auto-assembles the per-container evidence pack that wins a D&D dispute.

The core: free-time reconciliation against ground truth

For each billed container, LAYDAY reconstructs free time against the real event record — vessel discharge, container availability, gate-in/gate-out timestamps, appointment windows, and terminal closures — and lines it up against the carrier's stated free-time window and the actual charge. The output is a source-cited, per-container dossier showing exactly which days were billed when the required action was physically impossible.

That is the argument that carried every on-the-merits D&D matter in the record: the terminal was closed (TCW), no return location was given (Wan Hai), no appointments existed during free time (ONE), the wrong rate tier was applied (MSC overcharge count). It is jurisdiction-independent — it survives regulatory churn.

The outcome ledger

Every dispute LAYDAY supports is logged with its outcome, defect type, and the evidence that carried it — each tied to a primary FMC source, independently checkable. The seed is 9 high-fidelity, primary-sourced FMC decisions encoding precisely which arguments win on which facts.

The incumbent, BlueCargo, self-reports a 95% dispute win rate, up to 75% recoverable per diem, $5.2M recovered, and 230+ terminals. Those figures are not independently audited. Our differentiation is independently-verified outcomes and section-level Part 541 rigor — not a marketing number.

Built vs. planned (honest)

We will not show you a roadmap dressed up as shipped features. Here is exactly what works today and what does not.

Works today
  • Invoice parse + formal check. Reads a D&D invoice (JSON / email-body) and checks element-presence against the 46 CFR § 541.6 required-contents list and the § 541.7 30-day window. API: POST /invoices, GET /invoices/{id}/findings
  • Free-time reconciler. Recomputes chargeable days against event timestamps, flags overcharged days, and produces a money-delta per finding. API: returned in /findings as recomputed
  • Draft dispute dossier. Assembles a draft, source-cited per-container dossier from findings. Draft only — a human confirms before anything is sent. API: POST /invoices/{id}/dossier (always draft)
  • Deadline + value-at-risk. 30-day clock and the USD exposed if the window lapses. API: GET /invoices/{id}/deadline
  • Outcome ledger (seeded). 9 primary-sourced FMC decisions, structured by defect type and decisive evidence.
Roadmap / not yet built
  • Real-invoice defect rate (R1) — UNMEASURED. No real invoices have been audited yet. The first milestone is a consented n=20–50 pilot, then n=96 for a ±9.8pp Wilson interval. Any defect rate you see anywhere else right now is a guess. Ours is pending.
  • Broad carrier / terminal coverage. Today the parser handles structured JSON and email-body text; PDF is interface-only.
  • Subscription deadline-monitoring dashboard. The endpoints exist; the recurring multi-tenant surface does not.
  • Distribution. Solo founder, no industry relationships yet. Go-to-market is consent-only, recipient-side outreach to forwarders/NVOCCs and trade bodies.
  • A send action. There is no send endpoint and never will be an automatic one. A dossier is born draft and stays draft; transition to sent is a human action, out of band. Nothing is transmitted to any carrier or the FMC by this system.

Endpoint shapes above match the real packages/api/main.py and packages/schema/models.py. No carrier or customer data leaves the system automatically.

The honest risks

We state these before you have to ask.

Get the R1 pilot

We are looking for 20–50 real, consented D&D invoices from forwarders and NVOCCs to measure the actual defect rate. Leave an email and we will send the pilot one-pager.