After Montgomery: How the Freight Industry Is Responding to the Supreme Court’s Broker Liability Ruling

By Joshua Rubenstein

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Truck Accidents

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Last Modified on May 22, 2026

I have been watching the trucking industry respond to Montgomery v. Caribe Transport since the opinion dropped on May 14. Eight days in, the pattern is clear. The brokers, their trade association, the insurers, and the Wall Street analysts who cover them are all saying versions of the same thing in different keys. They are minimizing the ruling, repositioning their public posture, and lobbying Congress.

This post is the follow-up to our May 14 analysis of the Supreme Court’s actual holding. If you want the facts of Montgomery, Justice Barrett’s opinion, and what the four-element negligent hiring test looks like in Louisiana, start there. This one is about everything that has happened in the five days since.

The C.H. Robinson Statement: Disappointed, and Already Quoting Kavanaugh

The first thing C.H. Robinson did after losing 9-0 was issue a statement that quoted Justice Kavanaugh. When you lose at the Supreme Court, you find the language in the opinion that cuts in your favor and put it in every piece of public communication you can. That is what they did.

In his concurrence joined by Justice Alito, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Court’s decision “should not be read to mean that brokers will routinely be subject to state tort liability in the wake of truck accidents.” C.H. Robinson’s chief legal officer Dorothy Capers leaned on exactly that language in the company’s press release. The full statement, as reported by CBS News, reads:

“Our hearts continue to go out to the victims of truck accidents. Safety is foundational to who we are — our employees and their families travel these same roads, and our business depends on safe freight delivery. While we are disappointed in the Court’s decision, we will continue to operate responsibly, support stronger federal enforcement, and work constructively with regulators, carriers, and customers to strengthen the national safety system and support safe, reliable transportation across the country.”

CEO David Bozeman went further in investor communications, warning the ruling would create “50 different state rules” that hurt consumers.

Two things to notice.

First, Kavanaugh joined the unanimous holding. He agreed C.H. Robinson loses. His concurrence is not a roadmap for evading liability — it is an observation that the ordinary care standard does not become strict liability. Defense lawyers who pluck the word “routinely” out of his opinion and wave it around will run into a straightforward response from the bench: a routine outcome does not need a Supreme Court ruling to enforce it.

Second, the “50 different state rules” argument is the same one Bozeman made before the ruling. The Court heard it. The same patchwork concern exists for trucking carriers themselves, and Congress left state tort suits against carriers fully intact. Nine justices were not persuaded. Re-litigating it in a press release does not change the math.

The press release closed with a push for Congress to pass Dalilah’s Law. We will come back to that one.

The Travel Agent Defense: TIA’s Analogy and Why It Falls Apart

The same day the ruling came down, the Transportation Intermediaries Association put out a statement from President and CEO Chris Burroughs. He called the ruling “deeply disappointing.” Then he reached for an analogy: forcing brokers to evaluate carrier safety, he said, is “like asking travel agents to evaluate the safety of a given airline despite the fact that the airline has been licensed to fly by the federal government.”

I want to sit with that one for a moment.

An airline is regulated by the FAA. Aircraft are physically inspected. Pilots run through medical clearances, simulator checks, and recurrent training audits the FAA can audit at any time. The air travel safety record reflects decades of rigorous, funded federal oversight on the equipment itself. A travel agent does not get to climb into the cockpit and look around.

A freight broker is in a different situation. The FMCSA publishes every motor carrier’s safety data on the SAFER website: crash rates, inspection scores, BASIC percentile rankings, out-of-service rates, conditional and unsatisfactory ratings. The Safety Measurement System goes deeper. Anyone with internet access can pull either one in seconds, for free, on a phone in the dispatch parking lot.

The analogy fails on a second front too. A travel agent does not pick the airline based on price plus a 90-second look at the carrier file. A broker does exactly that. The whole business model is matching shippers with carriers and pocketing the spread between what the shipper pays and what the carrier accepts. Carrier selection is not incidental to brokerage. It is brokerage.

The TIA’s analogy is the kind of argument lawyers make when they have nothing else. It will not survive contact with a jury. Show the jury the SAFER page. Show them how long it takes to check it. Ask them whether the broker did.

What Wall Street Analysts Actually Said

The defense bar is already framing the ruling as something to fear less than initially thought. Two equity research notes drove that storyline.

Reporting from Transport Topics summarized analyst notes from Susquehanna’s Harrison Bauer and Baird’s Daniel Moore. Bauer wrote that the “concurrence language isn’t as harsh” as feared. Moore wrote that “plaintiffs will still have to prove ordinary negligence,” and noted that brokers who run reasonable vetting programs should be able to defend themselves.

Both observations are technically correct. Both are also non-events for plaintiffs’ counsel.

The ruling was always about preemption, not the merits of any individual case. Montgomery removes the FAAAA-preemption defense brokers were using to dismiss cases at the pleading stage. It does not lower the plaintiff’s burden of proof. Ordinary negligence has been the standard in every state for more than a century. The change is procedural — the case gets to discovery, and then to a jury, instead of dying on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion.

What the analysts are really telling investors is that Montgomery is not strict liability. That has never been the plaintiff’s claim. The plaintiff’s claim is that ordinary care, applied to a multi-billion-dollar broker with sophisticated systems, full access to FMCSA safety data, and roughly thirty seconds to check a carrier’s SAFER profile, requires more than rubber-stamping any operator with a DOT number.

The Compliance Vendors Just Handed Plaintiffs a Roadmap

Within forty-eight hours of the ruling, the trucking compliance industry started publishing guidance for brokers. The advice is uniformly sensible. It is also, for plaintiffs’ counsel, the most useful document set produced this week.

J.J. Keller’s compliance team published a piece titled “Freight broker liability just got real.” It told brokers to:

• Pull the FMCSA Safety Measurement System data on every carrier before dispatch
• Document the vetting process in writing
• Capture the carrier’s safety rating, BASIC percentile scores, crash history, and out-of-service rates at the moment of selection
• Review carrier credentials continuously, not once at onboarding
• Maintain an auditable file showing what was checked, when, and by whom

Read that as a defense bar checklist. Then read it as a plaintiff’s deposition outline. They are the same document.

When I take the deposition of a broker’s safety director after Montgomery, I will go through the J.J. Keller checklist line by line. Did you check the SMS data on this carrier on this date? Show me the printout. Show me the timestamp. Show me the screenshot of the BASIC percentiles. Show me your written process. Show me your audit log.

The vendor industry has written, in public, the standard of care it expects brokers to meet. Brokers will be measured against that standard.

Project44 founder and CEO Jett McCandless added something useful to the conversation. He told FreightWaves that the right answer is “objective, verifiable credentials” — meaning carrier scoring that runs on public data, not reputation. That is the same standard a Louisiana jury will apply. Did the broker check the objective, verifiable data? Did they document it?

XPO and Landstar Are Already Pricing In Consolidation

The most candid statements about the ruling came from two of the largest publicly traded brokers in the United States.

XPO Chairman and CEO Drew Wilkerson told investors the decision could force smaller brokers out of business as insurance premiums rise. He predicted “consolidation through mergers and acquisitions,” with organic growth opportunities for the larger players. As reported by Truck News, he framed the ruling as a competitive advantage for firms with the resources to build robust compliance programs.

Landstar System President and CEO Frank Lonegro was more direct. “Smaller players are going to get priced out of the market because of the cost structure going up,” he said. He added that companies may not survive “in an environment where you have to have $5 million or $10 million of insurance just to cover a single incident.”

Those numbers tell you something. Federal regulations require a freight broker to maintain a BMC-84 surety bond of $75,000. The minimum liability insurance required of motor carriers is $750,000 for general freight. A broker dispatching a 40-ton tractor-trailer carries less mandatory financial responsibility than the small Louisiana auto-policy limits we see every day. Wilkerson and Lonegro are conceding, on the record, that those numbers are not sufficient to cover a single serious crash. They are right. They have been right for a long time.

What the Industry Is Not Saying

For everything the brokerage industry has put on the record since May 14, what is missing matters more.

C.H. Robinson’s press release does not address the on-the-record allegation CBS News reported in April: that an actual C.H. Robinson contact told carrier owner Alexander Delgado, whose company had been flagged for shutdown, to just “open up another one.” Delgado’s prior companies operated as JAJ Trucking, JDA Transportation, and ADA Logistics before he ended up running BLF Truck Transportation — the carrier whose driver, with cocaine and methamphetamine in his system, killed four members of one family on Christmas Eve 2022 on I-75 near Cincinnati. C.H. Robinson’s only public response was to attack Delgado’s credibility.

That is the choice the company made. Not a denial that the conversation happened. Not a sworn affidavit from the broker rep on the other end of the call. A line in a statement saying the source is not credible.

A jury will get to weigh that.

The TIA’s travel-agent analogy and C.H. Robinson’s Kavanaugh quote both presume the broker did its job. The Delgado allegation, if proven, is the opposite story — a major broker telling a problem carrier to start over under a new name so it could keep getting loads. That allegation is in the public record. Discovery in cases nationwide is now going to test it.

The Defense Quote-Mining Playbook — and How to Neutralize It

The defense bar is already drafting motions in limine and summary judgment briefs built around two phrases from the Kavanaugh concurrence. The first is “routinely.” The second is “ask the hard questions.”

Anticipate both.

When a broker’s lawyer cites Kavanaugh’s “routinely” line in a summary judgment brief, point the court to the rest of the opinion. Kavanaugh said brokers will not face liability “routinely” because most brokers, in most cases, will be able to show they exercised ordinary care. He did not say plaintiffs need a heightened pleading standard. He did not say the ordinary care standard is paused. He said exactly what every plaintiff’s lawyer has always said: most cases turn on whether the defendant did its job.

The “ask the hard questions” line is more useful for plaintiffs than defense. Kavanaugh wrote that brokers who “ask the hard questions” should be able to defend themselves. Translation: brokers who do not ask hard questions cannot defend themselves. Make the defendant produce its hard questions. Make the safety director answer them under oath. If the answer is that the company asked no questions beyond “are you registered with DOT and do you have insurance,” the concurrence cuts the other way.

Dalilah’s Law Is Not a Fix for Montgomery

C.H. Robinson’s press release pivoted to Congress. The company endorsed Dalilah’s Law, a bill named for Dalilah Coleman, who was killed in a 2023 trucking crash. The TIA echoed the call.

Read the bill. Dalilah’s Law started as the “Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act” before being renamed. Its core provisions focus on commercial driver’s license reform: mandating English-language proficiency testing, restricting non-domiciled CDLs, cracking down on unqualified foreign drivers, and targeting certain foreign dispatch services. Those are CDL integrity measures. They are not a restoration of the FAAAA preemption shield that Montgomery eliminated.

C.H. Robinson’s endorsement of Dalilah’s Law is a clever piece of public relations. It associates the company with a grieving family while changing the subject from broker accountability to driver credentialing. A reporter who runs the talking point without reading the bill text will tell readers C.H. Robinson is “pushing for trucking safety reform” — true in a sense, and beside the point as applied to the case the company just lost 9-0.

Whether Congress eventually moves a bill specifically restoring federal preemption for broker liability is a separate fight. It will be hard. The Supreme Court read the FAAAA’s safety exception unanimously to cover negligent hiring. Reversing that with new legislation requires Congress to affirmatively immunize brokers from state tort liability for selecting unsafe carriers. That is a hard vote to cast in any state where there has been a multi-fatality 18-wheeler crash, which is to say, every state.

What This Means for Louisiana Crash Victims

The industry response is loud. The law has not changed since May 14.

In Louisiana, the prescriptive period for most personal injury claims is two years from the date of the injury under Louisiana Civil Code article 3493.1. Move quickly. Broker vetting files, dispatch system records, driver qualification documents, and ECM data on the truck itself can be lost within months if no one sends a litigation hold.

Our firm has been litigating broker and shipper liability in Louisiana since long before Montgomery. In Knoten v. Westbrook, 193 So.3d 380 (La. App. 4th Cir. 2016), we secured one of the first verdicts in this state establishing broker and shipper liability for a trucking crash — total recovery over $90 million. Montgomery clears away the federal preemption argument brokers nationwide were using to delay or dismiss cases like that one. It does not change what plaintiffs have to prove. It opens the courthouse door for a fight that already, on the merits, favors the victim.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has Montgomery changed any of the law since it came down on May 14, 2026?

No. Press releases, analyst notes, and lobbying push do not change what nine justices unanimously held. Brokers who hire unsafe carriers can be sued in state court. The FAAAA preemption defense at the pleading stage is gone. The merits standard is ordinary care in carrier selection, which is the same negligence standard that has applied to every other commercial enterprise for over a century.

What is the most useful piece of public information for a broker negligent-hiring case?

The carrier’s FMCSA safety record at the time of dispatch. Pull the SAFER page, the SMS BASIC percentile scores, the crash history, the out-of-service rates, and any conditional or unsatisfactory safety rating. Those records, dated to the load, are the spine of the case. Compare them to the broker’s documented vetting file. If the broker has no documented vetting file, the absence is itself evidence.

Does C.H. Robinson’s endorsement of Dalilah’s Law mean broker liability is about to be reversed by Congress?

No. Dalilah’s Law is a commercial driver’s license integrity measure. It does not restore the FAAAA preemption shield. A separate bill that affirmatively immunizes brokers from state tort liability for negligent carrier selection would be required. Such a bill has not been introduced. Even if introduced, it would face significant opposition in states with serious 18-wheeler crash histories.

Should plaintiffs’ attorneys be worried about the Kavanaugh concurrence?

No. The Kavanaugh concurrence agreed with the majority and held against the broker. His observation that liability will not be “routine” is consistent with the ordinary care standard the majority adopted. Defense lawyers who quote the word “routinely” out of context will need to explain to the court why the rest of the concurrence rejects every theory their client argued. The concurrence is a plaintiff-favorable opinion. Read it carefully.

How long do I have to file a Louisiana truck accident claim involving a freight broker?

Two years from the date of the injury under Louisiana Civil Code article 3493.1. The clock runs the same way against the broker as it does against the carrier and driver. Send a litigation hold letter early. Broker vetting records and dispatch communications can disappear within months absent preservation.