When the United States Supreme Court last month issued its ruling in the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC case, which addressed whether Federal preemption under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) applies to negligent hiring claims involving motor carrier vehicle safety regulations for freight transportation brokers, there was a whole host of differing opinions on what it could mean for the trucking sector, in terms of the potential ramifications for carrier vetting, insurance, and, liability, among other factors.
The impetus for this case stems from a 2017 trucking crash, according to an October 2025 Supreme Court publication addressing that the case was granted certiorari by the Supreme Court. The Court said that petitioner Shawn Montgomery sustained severe and permanent injuries after his tractor trailer was struck by a truck driven by respondent Yosniel Varela-Mojena, whom was driving a load of plastic pots through Illinois for respondent Caribe Transport II, LLC. It added that respondent C.H. Robinson coordinated the shipment.
After being injured in a truck accident, Montgomery sued several parties, including transportation broker C.H. Robinson. He claimed the broker was negligent in hiring the trucking companies because it knew or should have known, based on a carrier’s poor safety record, that they posed a significant accident risk. Lower courts dismissed the claim, holding that it was preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA), which limits state laws affecting trucking prices, routes, or services. They also found that the FAAAA’s safety exception did not apply.
The Supreme Court reversed those decisions, ruling that negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers fall within the FAAAA’s safety exception, which preserves state authority over motor vehicle safety. Because such claims require brokers to use reasonable care when selecting carriers, they directly relate to the safety of trucks operating on public roads.
In a concurring opinion, Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged that trucking companies are generally better positioned than brokers to monitor safety. However, they emphasized that brokers may sometimes know about unsafe carriers and should have incentives to avoid doing business with them. They also noted that brokers who act reasonably should not face excessive liability.
One major takeaway of the Supreme Court’s ruling, according to Jeff Tucker, CEO of Haddonfield, N.J.-based Tucker Company Worldwide, the nation’s oldest privately-held freight brokerage, is that, at the end of the day, nothing has changed, in that brokers, forwarders, and shippers were sued prior to this ruling, and will continue to be sued after it.
“What this case should reinforce is that there are enormous differences between transportation providers,” he stated in a LinkedIn post. “There are differences between brokers. There are differences between carriers. Choose your partners wisely. And if you are a shipper, impress upon your procurement teams that quality, safety, compliance, and operational discipline are not commodities. They are never ‘givens.’ Careful provider selection data often produces careless outcomes.”
And in an interview with LM, Tucker echoed that sentiment, observing that the ruling essentially serves as a continuation of where things stood before.
To that end, he cited the 2004 Schramm v. Foster case, which addressed whether a freight broker can be held liable for injuries caused by a motor carrier it selected, in which truck driver Brian Foster was moving a load that was brokered by C.H. Robinson and did not stop at an intersection, colliding with a pickup truck driven by Tyler Schramm, which left Schramm with brain injuries, coupled with evidence that suggested Foster had used up his hours-of-service limits before the accident.
In that case, both Foster and C.H. Robinson were sued, with the key question being if a freight broker can be held responsible for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier. The plaintiffs said that C.H. Robinson should have been aware that the carrier had safety concerns and not assigned the load to the carrier. But a court ruling said C.H. Robinson was acting as a broker and not as a motor carrier, with driver Foster not a company employee, making the company not vicariously liable and also did not provide the truck in the accident.
That subsequently led to issues in getting insurance for freight brokers, related to not owned auto liability, meaning any vehicle hired for a business gets into an accident, insurance would not cover that liability as cargo and instead be considered as property damage or an injury. What’s more, in 2006, another accident, Puckrein v. ATI Transport, whom was hauling a load for shipper Browning-Ferris Industries of New York (BFI-NY), in which Kevin and Alecia Puckrein were killed when a tractor-trailer ran a red light and hit their vehicle, with the tractor-trailer uninsured and also having registration problems. The main issue in that case centered on if BFI-NY could be liable as ATI was a contractor, and the plaintiffs contending BFI-NY did not carefully select and monitor companies moving its loads.
“At that point, insurance just ricocheted, in terms of how quickly the insurance sector became aware of this risk…and the proliferation of highway billboards regarding calling lawyers if you were in a truck accident,” said Tucker. “Both shippers and brokers have been on the hook for these liabilities for more than 20 years. The Montgomery case puts more scrutiny on the bad actors, like the ones with 20 MC (motor classification) numbers at the same address. One thing which has not received any attention is the notion that this is somehow a broker issue. It is a shipper issue, but something missing in the equation is that most global forwarders that operate here in the U.S. don’t have their own trucks doing most of the road freight, so they are in the same position that the shippers or brokers are in—and that is they are going out into the marketplace and finding carriers.
Many of the global forwarders don’t have the sophistication of higher-end brokers and carriers that are using multiple tools, technologies, and relationships to manage this risk and you wonder how well the insurance will come to the rescue. I think that is a big missing piece in the equation, and smaller brokers bringing their awareness to this issue is a good thing.”
In a blog posting, FTR Vice President of Trucking Avery Vise was aligned with Tucker’s views on the Supreme Court ruling, calling it important with major consequences, while not a huge shift in the law or an unthinkable about-face in policy.
“Brokers concerned about negligent selection risk should have been acting the same before May 14 as they presumably will after May 14,” wrote Vise. “The Supreme Court isn’t saying that the mere act of selecting a carrier involved in a crash makes the broker accountable for damages. Plaintiffs still must establish that brokers were negligent in their choices, and there’s no more clarity on what constitutes negligence now than there was before the Montgomery decision.
And perhaps that is the real reason for the uproar. The Supreme Court confirmed brokers’ potential liability for negligent selection without giving them a clear path to defeating such claims or setting any kind of national standard that brokers needed to meet. However, those issues were never before the court and were never likely to be part of the ruling, although Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion tries to address them somewhat. Rather, the court’s ruling revolves around the meaning of the phrase ‘with respect to motor vehicles’ in a 1994 law that preempts state regulation of rates, routes, and services in trucking. The key language is part of what is known as the ‘safety exception,’ and the high court ruled that the exception encompasses state tort claims based on brokers’ choice of motor carriers.
As for what the ruling means going forward, Vise noted that it confirms brokers need to take reasonable steps to choose carriers that they don’t consider risky, which he described as something they should have been doing all along.
From the perspective of Dean Croke, DAT industry analyst, explained the whole focus on whom a broker uses as a carrier has dramatically changed, adding that for carriers that don’t meet brokers required vetting standards, it becomes a very different operating environment.
“My takeaway is that compliance now becomes a competitive advantage, as opposed to a line item on a P&L and overhead,” he said. “For brokers, it will be their competitive advantage about how well they vet carriers.”
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) MCMIS (Motor Carrier Management Information System), a centralized database comprised of carrier census data, roadside inspections, and crash reports, which many shippers, carriers, and brokers use to vet carriers, only contains information on 5% of total industry accidents, but does not determine fault, noted Croke.
“If you look at any truckload fleet, 95% of their accidents are not state-reported,” he said. “If you think about accident risk and liability for a wreck, as an example, we’ve seen nuclear verdicts for a single vehicle lane departure, where a truck crosses the median and hits a bus and kills 12 people. Nuclear verdict. But that same event, five feet earlier, would have been into the median, stuck in the mud, and pulled back out by a wrecker for $850. They are both exactly the same thing. It was just a random outcome.
Now every broker that’s got a truck under a load today is exposed to exactly the same accident probability. The only difference now is, of course, the cost of all of that now becomes a lot higher, and it so doesn’t matter. I don’t think it matters how much you vet carriers, you can’t stop that driver falling asleep at the wheel and drifting off the road, because you can be 100% compliant to your hours-of-service and sound asleep at the wheel at the same time. And it is happening now as we speak. So, I don’t think anything’s changed in terms of accident probability. Broker exposure has maybe changed a little bit, but if you think about how are we vetting carriers based on their risk, I don’t think much has changed in the operational world.”
