|
|
Last
Modified on
Aug 03, 2026
On July 23, 2026, a Dallas County jury returned a verdict of $604,025,000 against a motor carrier, its driver, and the freight broker that put them on the road. The broker was C.H. Robinson (“CHR”). The jury assigned it 23% of the fault directly, then found the driver had been operating as CHR’s borrowed employee, which stacks the driver’s 45% on top and leaves the broker answering for roughly 68% of the number.
Robinson has said it will appeal. The number will probably move. What won’t move is the proof that got the jury there.
Three People Burned to Death on Interstate 20
On March 25, 2021, a Lupus Superior tractor-trailer slammed into stopped traffic on westbound I-20 in Warren County, Mississippi. Six vehicles were involved. Jennifer Lipe, Benjamin Brewer, and Rhoderick Coleman were in vehicles that caught on fire; they were trapped and burned to death. Two more people, Rodney Hawkins and Gabrielle Broussard, were hurt. The truck driver died too.
Now the part that should stop you.
According to trial evidence reported by Commercial Carrier Journal, the driver told both the carrier and C.H. Robinson that night that he was too sick to keep driving. The load did not get rescheduled. He kept going. He had also driven roughly four hours off-route in the early morning and falsified his logs to hide it, according to FleetOwner’s account of the record.
C.H. Robinson had brokered the load.
The Carrier’s Safety Record Was Public the Whole Time
CHR’s defense leaned on a government label. Lupus Superior held a “Satisfactory” FMCSA safety rating issued back in 2014, and chief legal officer Dorothy Capers said in the company’s public statement that the carrier “had safely delivered nearly 270 loads for our customers and held a Satisfactory FMCSA rating when we selected it.”
The jury looked past the label at the data. Plaintiffs’ expert Professor Thomas Corsi testified, per FleetOwner’s account of the trial, that “during every month of the year preceding the incident (March 2020 through March 2021), Lupus Superior LLC exceeded the FMCSA thresholds in Unsafe Driving and Hours-of-Service Compliance, a fact C.H. Robinson knew or should have known.”
Every month. For a year. Before the crash.
And here is the piece that plaintiff lawyers should write down: the evidence at trial was that Robinson checked the carrier’s safety rating but did not monitor its Safety Measurement System scores. A rating is a snapshot from a compliance review that may be a decade old. The SMS data provides an ongoing picture.
SMS data and SAFER reports update constantly, they’re free, and anyone with an internet connection can pull them in about ninety seconds.
Don’t take my word for it. Take it from the industry’s own side of the table. Cassandra Gaines is a transportation attorney, CEO of the carrier-vetting platform Carrier Assure, and an expert witness on carrier vetting standards, and she works for the people who hire trucking companies, not the people they run over. Days after the verdict she wrote this on LinkedIn:
“A safety rating is not a current safety certification. The industry has known for more than 15 years that brokers must review current inspections, violations and BASIC data rather than relying on an old government label.”
Fifteen years. She’s right, and that sentence is worth more to a plaintiff than any expert report, because it establishes the standard of care from inside the industry that keeps insisting it had no way to know.
The gap between what a broker checked once and what it could have checked monthly is where these cases live now.
Why the Borrowed-Employee Finding Is the Real Story
The 23% direct-negligence finding is the headline everybody quotes. The borrowed-employee finding is overlooked, and it sure shouldn’t be.
Per the judge’s charge in Lipe v. Lupus Superior, LLC, as reported by FreightWaves, the jury was asked whether the driver was “operating the vehicle in the furtherance of a mission for the benefit of C.H. Robinson and subject to control by C.H. Robinson as to the details of the mission.” The jury said yes. That answer converts a broker from a peripheral defendant with a modest fault share into the party holding the driver’s negligence.
This matters because of what sits underneath. Federal law still requires only $750,000 in liability coverage for a general-freight motor carrier under 49 C.F.R. § 387.9, a floor set in 1980 and never adjusted. Three deaths and two serious injuries will exhaust that before the first mediation. The money is upstream, with whoever selected the carrier and shaped the delivery.
That is the whole point of a control theory.
We Tried This Case Before: Knoten v. Westbrook
I keep reading commentary treating broker and shipper control as some new post-Montgomery invention. It isn’t. Blake Jones and I tried it in Orleans Parish more than a decade ago.
Just after midnight on Christmas Day 2008, a tractor-trailer plowed into the back of a GMC Yukon on Interstate 10 near LaPlace. The Yukon caught fire. Danielle Adams and two children, Kyren Thomas and Di’Avion Hite, were killed. Four more people were injured. The driver had been behind the wheel for 33 of the previous 36 hours.
The load belonged to Nurserymen’s Exchange, a plant supplier moving product to Wal-Mart. Nurserymen’s hired Shippers Choice, a freight forwarder, to arrange the transportation. Shippers Choice hired Western Star, the motor carrier that employed the driver. Same three-layer structure as Lipe, seventeen years earlier.
The jury returned damages totaling more than $90 million. Two rulings from that case map directly onto what the Dallas jury just did:
- The middleman was held vicariously liable. We won partial summary judgment against Shippers Choice, the freight forwarder, on respondeat superior. Shippers Choice took a supervisory writ, and the Fourth Circuit let it stand. Shippers then settled.
- The party at the top of the chain could not hide behind an independent-contractor label. Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit held Nurserymen’s vicariously liable because it had a representative meet the driver, hand her a driver instruction sheet, and require her signature before releasing the freight. The court called that instruction sheet “fatal to Nurserymen’s claim of independent contractor status.” Knoten v. Westbrook, 193 So.3d 380 (La. App. 4th Cir. 2016). The Louisiana Supreme Court denied writs.
The Fourth Circuit also rejected the same argument C.H. Robinson makes now. Nurserymen’s said it controlled nothing about the truck, the driving, or the rest schedule. The court’s answer: “We do not find this dispositive of the master-servant relationship.”
There’s one more parallel worth naming, and it comes from our trial record rather than the published opinion. Western Star didn’t hold a clean safety rating the whole time Shippers Choice hired it to move freight. Federal regulators downgraded the carrier to Conditional during part of that relationship. Shippers Choice never knew this because its owners qualified the carrier once and never looked again. The downgrade that was published in the federal system for anyone to pull went straight past the company that kept handing over loads.
That is the identical failure the Dallas jury punished seventeen years later. The rating a broker relies on is a moving number, and the only way to miss the movement is to not look.
What This Means If You Were Hurt
Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, 608 U.S. ___ (May 14, 2026), removed the preemption defense brokers had used to get out of these cases early, as I wrote when the Supreme Court handed the ruling down. Lipe is what the first trial looks like on the other side of that ruling. If you walked into my office tomorrow with a crash involving a brokered load, here’s what I’d be building toward:
- The vetting file. What the broker pulled, when it pulled it, and whether it ever pulled it again.
- The SMS history as of the crash date. Not today’s data. The scores the broker could have seen the week it tendered the load.
- Every communication about the delivery window. Appointment times, penalties, and reschedule requests are control evidence.
- The sick call, the fatigue call, the breakdown call. Someone almost always raised a problem before the crash. Find who was told and what they said back.
- The corporate structure behind the DOT number. Shared VINs and repeat authority revocations point to chameleon carriers, and that history is discoverable.
Evidence in these cases disappears fast. We send preservation letters quickly after being retained, because ELD records, dash camera footage, and carrier-qualification files have a way of aging out once a carrier knows a lawsuit is coming. Louisiana’s prescriptive period for personal injury is two years. Don’t use all of it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a freight broker be sued in Louisiana for hiring an unsafe trucking company?
Yes. After Montgomery, the FAAAA no longer shields brokers from state-law negligent-selection claims, and Louisiana courts had already allowed vicarious-liability theories against middlemen in transportation cases. Our post on freight broker liability in Louisiana walks through how those claims are built.
Does a “Satisfactory” FMCSA safety rating protect the broker that hired the carrier?
Not on its own, and Lipe is the proof. Lupus Superior’s rating dated to 2014 while its Unsafe Driving and Hours-of-Service scores exceeded federal intervention thresholds every month for the year before the crash. A rating records what an auditor found once. It says nothing about last month’s roadside inspections.
Anyone with an internet connection can check the FMCSA database. Brokers should check the rating every time a load is assigned to a carrier, to make sure the carrier is still rated “Satisfactory.” That isn’t the end of the inquiry, but it’s an absolutely necessary beginning.
What is a “borrowed employee,” and why does it matter to my case?
It means the jury found the driver was working the mission for the broker’s benefit and under the broker’s control as to the details. When that finding lands, the driver’s share of fault travels to the broker. In Lipe it took C.H. Robinson from 23% to roughly 68% of a $604 million verdict.
The verdict is called “advisory.” Is the money real?
Not yet. C.H. Robinson described it that way in its SEC filing, post-trial motions are pending, and the company has said it will appeal. Large verdicts frequently get reduced. The proof standard the jury applied is what carries forward to the next case.
Is it too late if my crash happened a while ago?
Maybe not, but call and let me look. Louisiana gives two years for most personal injury claims, and other states in the chain may give more. The bigger risk is usually the evidence, not the calendar.
For more than fifty years, on the land, on the water, and on the roadways of America, our firm has fought for injured people. If you or your family was hurt by an eighteen-wheeler, call us. We’ll look at the case, tell you straight what we see, and fight for you.
On the Land, on the Water or on the Roadways of America — We Will Fight for You.
Sources
- Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), Supreme Court slip opinion
- Knoten v. Westbrook, 193 So.3d 380 (La. App. 4th Cir. 2016)
- FreightWaves, C.H. Robinson hit with huge nuclear verdict in a post-Montgomery world (July 24, 2026)
- Commercial Carrier Journal, C.H. Robinson to appeal $604 million freight broker liability verdict (July 24, 2026)
- FleetOwner, Nuclear verdict pins C.H. Robinson, carrier, and driver for $604 million (July 28, 2026)
- Logistics Management, C.H. Robinson hit with $604 million advisory verdict in negligent carrier selection case (July 24, 2026)
- Cassandra Gaines, transportation attorney and CEO of Carrier Assure, LinkedIn post on the C.H. Robinson verdict and FMCSA safety ratings (July 2026)
- FMCSA, SAFER Company Snapshot and Safety Measurement System
- 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c); La. Civ. Code art. 2323; 49 C.F.R. § 387.9
