The Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, decided May 14, 2026, means freight brokers and forwarders can now face state negligent-hiring lawsuits when a motor carrier they selected causes an accident: the FAAAA preemption defense that got such suits dismissed early is gone. Liability is not automatic; what changed is that courts will now examine whether the intermediary exercised ordinary care at the moment of carrier selection, and that examination runs on documentation. The operational consequence lands on every desk that books trucking: each selection now needs a timestamped record of the carrier’s FMCSA safety data, the options compared, and who approved the choice. One industry outlet estimated 30 to 50 percent of brokers face existential risk from the shift, which overstates it, but the direction is real.
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 for all 9 justices. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, joined by Justice Alito, and it is the concurrence that sketches the practical safe harbor: brokers who select reputable carriers, and can demonstrate it, remain defensible.
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.
Timing matters for what happens next. Montgomery resolved the preemption question and sent the underlying case back down, so the standards for what “ordinary care in carrier selection” requires will now be built claim by claim in state courts over the next several years. Insurers are not waiting for that case law to settle: contingent auto liability questionnaires already ask about carrier vetting procedures, and renewal pricing follows the answers. The practical standard is being set by underwriters and plaintiffs’ discovery requests faster than by judges, and both of those audiences read documentation, which is exactly why the response to the ruling belongs in the ops workflow this quarter rather than in a legal memo filed for reference.
The ops implication
This is, at the working level, less a legal problem than a documentation problem, and documentation problems live inside operations, on the desks that book the trucks.
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.
The math on manual capture is unforgiving. Say the discipline version takes 5 minutes per booking: pull the FMCSA snapshot, save it to the job folder, note the alternatives, note the approver. At 20 bookings a month that is under 2 hours, entirely doable, and it is also precisely the kind of low-urgency task that loses to a ringing phone every single day. The record that exists for 60% of bookings is not a defense; the gap is where the plaintiff looks first. Compliance workflows only hold when they are the path of least resistance, which for a busy desk means the capture has to ride along with the booking rather than follow it as a chore.
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.
How does a selection record change the litigation math?
Walk the same accident through both versions of the file. In the undocumented version, the plaintiff’s attorney asks in discovery how the carrier was chosen, and the honest answer is an email thread with 3 rate quotes and no safety data. Every follow-up question makes it worse: was the FMCSA rating checked, by whom, when, against what alternatives. Silence on each one reads as negligence even where the actual selection was sensible, because the care that was exercised left no trace.
In the documented version, the same questions get answers with dates on them: the carrier’s safety data as it stood on the booking day, the 2 alternatives considered, the operator who approved and when. Per Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, a broker who selected a reputable carrier and can show it is the broker who survives. The facts of the selection did not change between the two versions. The record did, and after Montgomery the record is the case.
There is also a commercial half to this. Shippers with legal departments read the same ruling, and carrier-selection documentation is on its way to becoming a procurement question in RFPs, the way insurance certificates and C-TPAT status already are. The forwarder who can answer “show us your carrier vetting workflow” with a system rather than a paragraph is bidding from a stronger position, before any accident ever happens.
What a compliant booking flow looks like day to day
The workflow change is smaller than the legal shift suggests, provided it is systematic. A truck booking already generates the raw material: the rate request, the 3 or 4 replies, the chosen carrier, the tender. What is missing at most forwarders is capture, the step where that trail lands on the job record with timestamps instead of dissolving into the inbox. Bolting a safety-data snapshot onto that capture step adds seconds per booking. Reconstructing the same record 2 years later, for litigation, from a departed employee’s mailbox, is somewhere between expensive and impossible. The desks that come out of Montgomery fine are the ones that moved the record-keeping from memory to system while it was still cheap.
For how that carrier coordination workflow runs when bookings happen by email, see The Trucking Quote Gap Freight Software Ignores.
Request a demo to see how TIO tracks carrier selection and quote history across your trucking workflow.
Frequently asked questions
What did the Supreme Court rule in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II?
On May 14, 2026, the Court ruled 9-0 that the FAAAA does not shield freight brokers from state-law negligent-hiring claims when a motor carrier they selected causes an accident. The FAAAA's safety exception eliminates the preemption defense brokers had used to dismiss these suits early. Brokers are not automatically liable; courts will now reach the question of whether the broker exercised ordinary care in selecting the carrier.
Does the ruling apply to freight forwarders, or only to brokers?
The logic reaches any intermediary that selects motor carriers. A forwarder arranging domestic trucking, port drayage, or cross-border ground moves sits between the shipper and the truck exactly as a broker does. The functional test is who made the selection decision, and for those moves the answer is the forwarder's ops team, which is why the documentation burden lands on operations. A forwarder booking 20 truck moves a month is making 20 selection decisions a month, each one now potentially examinable.
What documentation protects a broker or forwarder after Montgomery?
Three records per booking: the carrier's FMCSA safety data as it stood at the time of selection, timestamped; the set of carriers considered, such as the 3 quotes compared; and who approved the selection and when. A timestamped record showing ordinary care at the selection moment is the defense that survives discovery. A general policy statement without per-load records is not.
Does a carrier safety check have to happen on every single load?
The defensible standard is per-selection rather than per-relationship. A carrier vetted once in 2024 and never re-checked can have a materially different FMCSA profile by 2026, and the record that matters is the one dated the day the load was tendered. At 20-plus truck bookings a month, that cadence only happens reliably when the workflow captures it automatically.