May 14, 2026. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state negligent-hiring lawsuits when a dangerous motor carrier they selected causes an accident.
The case: freight broker C.H. Robinson arranged a shipment. Motor carrier Caribe Transport II put a truck on the road. Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when that truck struck his vehicle on an Illinois highway. Montgomery sued C.H. Robinson for negligent carrier selection. Brokers had long relied on the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) to dismiss these claims at an early stage. The Court said the FAAAA’s own safety exception eliminates that shield.
Justice Barrett wrote the unanimous opinion. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, joined by Justice Alito.
FreightWaves called it “probably the biggest announcement or event to happen since deregulation” and estimated 30 to 50 percent of freight brokers face existential risk as a result. That framing may be aggressive, but the underlying shift is not.
What actually changed
Freight brokers are not automatically liable when a carrier they hired causes an accident. That is not the ruling. The ruling removes the procedural tool brokers used to get negligent-hiring claims thrown out before trial.
Courts will now reach the question of whether a broker exercised ordinary care when selecting a carrier. That determination comes down to documentation. Brokers who selected reputable carriers and can show it are defensible. Per Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, that is the path that survives litigation.
The question of whether you did your homework on a carrier now gets answered in discovery, not at a motion to dismiss.
The ops implication
This is not a legal problem. It is a documentation problem, and documentation problems live inside operations.
Every freight broker and freight forwarder arranging motor carrier moves is affected by this logic. When your team selects a carrier, coordinates drayage, or books a trucking lane, your team is the intermediary between your customer and the truck on the road. That is where the liability exposure sits.
The moment that matters is the selection moment. Who chose this carrier, when, and based on what information?
“We always vet our carriers” is not documentation. A timestamped record of the carrier’s FMCSA safety rating at the time of booking, the options that were evaluated, and who approved the selection is documentation. That record is the defense if a claim ever reaches discovery.
Before this ruling, running a carrier safety check was a best practice. After it, the absence of a documented check is the fact a plaintiff’s attorney will lead with.
What your ops team needs to capture on every carrier booking
- Carrier safety score at time of selection. Not today’s score. The score when the load was tendered. FMCSA data is public. The record needs to be timestamped.
- The set of carriers considered. If you got three quotes and selected the safest carrier at a competitive rate, that story is worth telling. If there is no record, the story does not exist.
- Who made the selection and when. Approval at the individual load level, not a blanket policy statement.
At low volume, this is a manual workflow. At the volume a typical freight forwarding operation runs through email, phone, and a TMS, it is a workflow that does not happen without a system capturing it.
Where this lands for forwarding operations teams
Freight forwarders who move domestic freight, arrange cross-border ground moves, or coordinate port drayage are not pure brokers, but the functional relationship is the same. You sit between the shipper and the carrier. The selection decision is yours.
If your carrier booking workflow runs through email, the paper trail for that selection decision currently lives nowhere. The emails exist. The rate quote comparison that happened in someone’s inbox exists. The reasoning that led to choosing one carrier over another does not.
A trucking rate management workflow that captures carrier quote history, tracks who was selected, and timestamps each booking decision is not just about ops efficiency. After Montgomery, it is about demonstrating reasonable care at the moment of selection.
That documentation does not prevent accidents. It determines what happens in court after one.
Request a demo to see how TIO tracks carrier selection and quote history across your trucking workflow.