On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that the FAAAA does not preempt state law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers. Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion, which drew no dissent, and holds that a broker is required to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier concerning motor vehicle safety, which the FAAAA’s safety exception leaves to the states. 

The ruling creates no new federal requirement. There is no rule to file and no deadline to meet. What it removes is the procedural shield that previously let brokers get negligent selection claims dismissed before discovery, and what it exposes is a question the industry has been answering the wrong way for decades: “What does it actually mean to have vetted a carrier?”

Key takeaways

  • What the ruling changed: The Supreme Court ruled that negligent hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the FAAAA, making carrier selection practices more exposed to legal scrutiny.
  • Who it affects: Freight brokers most directly, but also shippers and carriers that need to show their vetting, safety, and compliance records can hold up under review.
  • What readers should do next: Review your carrier vetting process now and make sure your files show more than authority and insurance — they should document safety performance, coaching, maintenance, and compliance.

Nine trucks, three crashes, and a conditional rating

Let’s start with the facts.

In 2017, a shipper hired C.H. Robinson, the largest freight broker in the country, to move a load of plastic pots. Robinson gave the load to Caribe Transport II, LLC, a nine-truck carrier. In Illinois, Caribe’s driver, Yosniel Varela-Mojena, drifted off the road and hit a tractor-trailer parked on the shoulder. The man inside, Shawn Montgomery, lost his leg.

The public record on Caribe was free to pull and ugly to read. FMCSA had given the carrier a Conditional rating, with documented problems in driver qualification, hours of service, and maintenance. Caribe had at least three reportable crashes involving nine trucks between May and September 2017. And months before Montgomery’s crash, this same driver had crashed and been cited for careless operation.

Nothing was hidden. No fraud, no forged documents, nothing that needed a subpoena. Every red flag was public. The carrier got the load anyway.

How it reached the Supreme Court

Montgomery sued the driver, the carrier, and the broker. His claim against Robinson never got past the pleadings because, in the Seventh Circuit, federal law (the FAAAA) preempted negligent hiring claims against brokers. Two circuits agreed with that reading. Two others didn’t. In practical terms: whether a victim could even sue the broker depended on which state the crash happened in.

Both sides agreed the split had to be resolved. Robinson, despite winning, joined Montgomery in asking the Court to take the case. Ten weeks after the argument, the Court ruled 9-0 against the brokers.

The reasoning is succinct: The FAAAA preempts state laws about a broker’s prices, routes, or services, but it carves out state safety authority over motor vehicles. A negligent hiring claim asks whether the broker used ordinary care in deciding which trucks would be on the road. That’s about motor vehicles, so the claim survives.

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, wrote separately to say the case was closer than the majority admitted, and then ruled against the brokers anyway. He called the old regime a black hole of accountability: federal law imposed no real safety duty on broker hiring, and preemption blocked state law from filling the gap. He cited the numbers, roughly 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries a year from truck crashes, and called broker accountability a matter of life and death.

When the most defense-friendly opinion in a unanimous decision reads like that, nobody should be waiting for this to get walked back. The time for brokers, shippers, fleets, and insurers to act is now.

Compliant, safe, defensible: three questions, one screenshot

Now to the part that lands on your desk.

Ask a fleet whether it is compliant, safe, and defensible, and most will answer all three by pulling up the same screenshot. Active authority, insurance on file. Those are three different questions.

Compliant means the federal floor was cleared. Caribe Transport was compliant, had active authority, and had insurance on file right up until the crash. The $750,000 minimum it filed against was set in 1980 and has never been adjusted; inflation alone would put it near $3 million today. The floor was built as a threshold for market entry, not a measure of whether a company should be under your load.

Safe means the trucks are maintained, the drivers are real and rested, and somebody inside the building is watching. FMCSA had already answered that question about Caribe, in writing, with a Conditional rating. Roughly four out of five carriers have no rating at all, so screening on rating alone passes nearly everyone, but Caribe was in the reviewed minority. The review said deficient. The freight moved anyway. The failure was never a shortage of data; it was that nobody’s process required anyone to act on it.

Defensible means the record you created before the crash survives an attorney whose job is finding the distance between ‘what you knew’ and ‘what you should have known.’ Plaintiff’s counsel pulls the carrier’s full public record, crash history, OOS rates, violation patterns, prior revocations, officer overlap with shuttered carriers, insurance cancel-and-refile behavior, in an afternoon, for free. Then they pull your carrier file and ask: “All of this was public, so why didn’t you look?”

“They had authority and insurance” is the answer that loses. After Montgomery, it loses before a jury rather than quietly in a motion. The bottom line is the broker chose the carrier, the choosing was the service, and the choosing was not done well. C.H. Robinson had Caribe’s file available to it, just as everyone else did: the Conditional rating, the violation history, and the pattern. A jury was asked to decide whether a sophisticated intermediary that selects carriers for a living gets to say it never looked. The jury found that the intermediary does not get to say that, and the number attached to that answer reset the market. 

The old broker defense was structural: we don’t own the trucks, we don’t employ the drivers, federal preemption shields our selection decisions. Every leg of that stool is now wobbling in some circuit. What replaces it is a duty that looks a lot like the one shippers already carry: if you put freight on a carrier, you own what you knew and what you could have known at the moment you tendered the load. A rate confirmation is a selection decision. Plaintiff’s counsel will treat it as one, and “the carrier had authority and insurance” works no better for the broker than it does for the shipper. It may work worse because vetting carriers is the one thing a broker unambiguously does. 

The evidence that’s beyond a database

The public record is rich with evidence of how bad a carrier is. It contains almost nothing about how good one is. Crash data, violations, and OOS rates describe failure. There is no federal database of the coaching session that worked, the defect that got fixed in nineteen hours, or the driver whose following distance improved because someone sat down with him in March. No record of how many vehicles you have on the road, how recent, or how safe. 

That evidence exists inside the carrier’s operation. For fleets running a modern telematics platform, data is being generated every day, whether anyone intends it or not. Safety events the AI Dashcam flagged and your team reviewed. Coaching delivered, with the driver’s acknowledgment attached. Hours of service that are clean because the ELD makes them clean, not because someone scrubbed logs on Friday. DVIR defects with closure timestamps. Maintenance intervals actually hit.

 The Motive Integrated Operations Platform will provide you with months’ worth of reports.

After Montgomery, that report is the only document in existence that answers the safe question rather than the compliant one, and it is the document a broker’s defense gets built from. Robinson’s problem in Montgomery was that the public record screamed and the file whispered. The carriers who win in the new environment are the ones whose file can out-talk the public record.

The warning that comes with it

Telematics data is discoverable. All of it, including the events nobody opened. A fleet that installs cameras, generates four thousand safety events in a year, reviews two hundred, and coaches no one has built a defense. It has built a record of notice, which is the single worst thing in litigation. Opposing counsel will put the March, June, and August events on the screen, then the crash, and ask the safety director what happened in between. Fleet’s own technology was the most damaging exhibit in the room, precisely because the company paid to know and then declined to act.

Often the question becomes, “What if we’re at fault?” Managing a risk-controlled, defensible program will have failures. Everyone fails. What that program does is mitigate that risk, and it could be the difference between paying $40,000 to make someone whole after a broken arm or being asked to make someone rich. 

The hardware is not the asset. The loop is the asset: detect, review, coach, document, and verify that the behavior changed. Motive’s coaching workflow exists to make that loop auditable, with review status and driver acknowledgment attached to each event. Run it end-to-end, and the data defends you. Buy the cameras and skip the workflow, and you have financed your own discovery problem.

Where this leaves you

Justice Kavanaugh observed in his concurrence that brokers facing liability for ignoring poor safety records have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable carriers.

Selection pressure now runs through safety evidence, and the carriers who can produce it will feel that pressure as demand. Compliance is the price of the ticket. It gets you into the market. It didn’t keep Caribe Transport out, and it won’t keep you out of a courtroom. The record you build between now and your next crash is the only thing that will.

Learn more about how Motive’s driver safety, coaching, and compliance products build the operational record the post-Montgomery market runs on, or reach out to our team to talk through what your file would say today.