Montgomery v. Caribe Transport, explained for freight brokers

May 19, 2026 · 9 min read

TL;DR

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that freight brokers can be sued under state law for negligently hiring unsafe motor carriers. The FAAAA preemption shield brokers have relied on since 1994 is dead. Every broker now needs a documented vetting record for every carrier on every load. Your $75K bond does not cover a $36M verdict.

What the court actually decided

The case is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC. The facts are awful and simple. In December 2017, Shawn Montgomery pulled over on Interstate 70 in Illinois for a mechanical issue. A tractor-trailer operated by Caribe Transport rear-ended his stopped car. He lost a leg. The load on the trailer had been arranged by C.H. Robinson, one of the largest freight brokers in the country.

Montgomery sued the broker as well as the carrier, on the theory that the broker negligently selected an unsafe motor carrier. C.H. Robinson argued that the federal Hazardous Materials Transportation Act, plus the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 (FAAAA), preempted any state-law negligence claim against a broker. Brokers had been winning this argument in most circuits for years.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for a unanimous court, rejected that defense. The FAAAA does broadly preempt state laws related to a broker's prices, routes, and services. But the same statute carves out an exception for state safety regulation "with respect to motor vehicles." The court held that a negligent-hiring claim against a broker falls inside that safety exception, because the whole point of the claim is to encourage brokers to select safer carriers. The case can now proceed in state court.

What the court did not do

Read the limited holding carefully. The Supreme Court did not say C.H. Robinson is liable. It did not say every broker is automatically liable for what their carriers do. It said the federal preemption shield does not block these claims from going forward. From here it is up to state juries to decide whether a broker exercised reasonable care.

Two things follow from that. First, the case-by-case nature means documentation is now everything. A broker who can show a jury a contemporaneous record of how they vetted a carrier is in a different legal position than a broker who cannot. Second, plaintiffs' lawyers now have a green light. Expect a meaningful uptick in claims within months, and expect them to be aggressive on discovery requests for vetting records.

The math problem brokers now have

FMCSA requires brokers to post a $75,000 surety bond. That bond is designed to cover unpaid carrier invoices and shipper claims for cargo loss. It does not respond to personal-injury verdicts. The bond will not help you when a jury awards a multi-million-dollar judgment to a family who lost a parent on the highway.

Meanwhile, the median trucking verdict against a defendant carrier in the United States is now $36 million according to current trucking litigation data. Verdicts above $100 million are no longer rare. Most small and mid-sized brokers do not carry contingent auto liability insurance at all. The ones that do typically carry single-occurrence limits of $1M to $5M. The exposure gap is not subtle.

What you actually have to prove now

In a negligent-selection case against a broker, a plaintiff will argue you knew or should have known the carrier was unsafe and booked them anyway. To defend that, you need to be able to put four things in front of a jury, dated to the moment you booked the load:

The carrier's FMCSA safety rating at time of booking. Conditional or unsatisfactory ratings are the headline risk. You need to show you checked.
The carrier's CSA scores across the seven BASIC categories, especially Unsafe Driving and Hours of Service. A carrier alerting in multiple categories is the kind of fact pattern a plaintiff's lawyer builds a case around.
Insurance currency and limits at time of booking. Lapsed or insufficient coverage is one of the cleanest negligent- hiring fact patterns.
Active operating authority. A carrier whose MC authority was suspended, revoked, or never activated for the type of load you tendered is indefensible.

The thing that wins is contemporaneous evidence. A printout you generate three weeks into discovery, after the demand letter arrives, is worth a fraction of a record that was created at the moment of booking and never modified since.

Why your current process probably isn't enough

Most small and mid-sized brokers run carrier vetting through some combination of FMCSA SAFER lookups, a spreadsheet, and the memory of whoever booked the load. Three reasons that does not survive contact with a deposition.

First, none of those tools timestamp and lock the record at the moment of booking. A row in a spreadsheet can be edited at any time. There is no cryptographic or audit-trail proof that the values reflect what was on screen the morning a dispatcher said yes to the load.

Second, FMCSA data changes. A carrier whose authority is active today may have been revoked last quarter. Pulling SAFER data now and showing it to a jury proves nothing about what you saw a year ago. The data has to be captured then, not later.

Third, vetting is not a one-shot event. The carrier you booked clean in January may have racked up a dozen unsafe driving violations by June. If you kept booking them across that drift without re-checking, a jury will hear about it. You need ongoing monitoring with logged events, not annual re-verification.

What to do in the next 30 days

Call your insurance broker today. If you do not carry contingent auto liability and contingent cargo, this is the most urgent gap. Coverage at $1M to $5M will not cover a worst case but it materially shifts your litigation posture.
Write down your vetting standard. Three to five checks, applied consistently to every carrier, every load. A jury forgives an imperfect process applied consistently. They do not forgive ad-hoc judgment.
Start capturing the record. At the moment of booking, save the FMCSA data, the insurance certificate, and the authority status to a file you can produce on demand. PDF, JSON, screenshot. Whatever your team will actually do every time.
Re-check on a schedule. Quarterly at minimum for active carriers. Sooner if you book them weekly.
Talk to your counsel about your carrier contract. Indemnification, additional-insured status, and required minimum carrier limits all matter more now than they did three weeks ago.

The bottom line

The legal landscape brokers have operated in for thirty years just ended. You are not going to be saved by federal preemption anymore. You are going to be judged by what you did, what you wrote down, and what you can produce in front of a jury years after the fact. The brokers who build a defensible record this quarter are going to be in a different category from the ones who keep booking on memory and spreadsheets.

That is the problem VettedHaul exists to solve. A signed, timestamped vetting record per carrier per load, captured at the moment of booking, exportable as a subpoena-ready evidence pack the day the demand letter arrives. Not later. Join the waitlist if that fits.