Knock-for-Knock

Knock-for-knock is a reciprocal indemnity regime in towage, offshore, and seismic contracts under which each party bears loss of or damage to its own property and injury to its own people, regardless of fault, and indemnifies the other accordingly. It replaces fault-based allocation to make insurance cheap and litigation rare in operations where many contractors work side by side. BIMCO’s TOWCON, SUPPLYTIME, and the offshore mutual-hold-harmless schemes are built on it; courts enforce it even against a party’s own negligence where the words are clear.