In January 2026, Amazon.com and Wayfair filed an amicus brief in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC asking the Supreme Court to do something specific. They asked the Court to hold that shippers – not just brokers – were protected from state-law negligent-selection claims by FAAAA preemption.
Read what Amazon wrote in its brief:
“This particular case involves only claims against brokers, but the same preemption questions are now regularly arising as to shippers, who are increasingly targeted by the plaintiffs’ bar in litigation.”
The largest shipper in the United States told the Supreme Court that shippers were already being sued under negligent-selection theories. Amazon asked the Court to stop those suits cold. On May 14, 2026, the Court ruled 9-0 in a direction that does the opposite (opinion; Amazon/Wayfair amicus brief). The defense bar is now publishing client alerts confirming what Amazon’s counsel admitted: shippers may be next.
This post is about what that means – not for Amazon, for the carriers, brokers, and shippers, and the people they injure, across the Louisiana, Texas, and Gulf South freight corridors I practice in.
Amazon and Wayfair filed jointly. Their argument was forthright. From the brief:
“Brokers and shippers play the same role when they hire motor carriers to transport property. Tort claims targeting these upstream actors seek to enforce a patchwork of inexact standards for selecting a particular motor carrier. Such claims are preempted by Section 14501(c)(1) because they are ‘related to’ the ‘service’ of a ‘motor carrier . . . with respect to the transportation of property.’”
Translation: Amazon told the Court the legal duty allegedly imposed on brokers is the same duty plaintiffs were already trying to impose on shippers. Same theory. Same exposure. One preemption rule should cover both.
The brief then made a request:
“The Court should clarify the law by expressly acknowledging that shippers – as well as brokers – are protected by Section 14501(c)(1)’s preemption provision. At a minimum, the Court should avoid any language or implication that preemption is limited to claims against brokers.”
The Court did neither. Justice Barrett’s unanimous opinion held that FAAAA’s safety exception preserves state-law negligent-selection claims because they “concern” motor vehicle safety. The reasoning didn’t turn on whether the defendant was a broker or a shipper. It turned on whether the state-law claim was directed at the safety of the trucks getting on the road. Negligent selection – by anybody upstream of the wheel – fits that description.
C.H. Robinson, the broker that lost the case, said the quiet part out loud three weeks later. From its June 4, 2026 freight market update:
“While not explicit, the Court also appeared to suggest that shippers, too, may be liable under state law.”
The defendant in Montgomery is now publicly telling its own shipper customers that the legal landscape has shifted. That’s how confident the freight industry is about where this is heading.
Days after the ruling, Adams and Reese – a regional defense firm with deep freight-industry roots – published a client alert authored by Christopher J. Kane, Christopher W. Earle, and John E. Stiffler (with LSU law student John Trapp). The article’s section on shippers carried a one-word headline: Shippers Beware.
Kane, Earle, and Stiffler put it bluntly:
“Shippers should not view Montgomery as solely a broker problem.”
Then they identified the precise theory plaintiffs will use:
“The decision’s logic focuses on the party that selects a carrier and has access to safety information bearing on that selection.”
A shipper that contracts with a broker – and through that broker indirectly hires a carrier – has access to the same publicly available FMCSA safety data the broker does. The shipper made a selection decision when it picked the broker. The broker made a selection decision when it booked the carrier. If the broker’s selection is now actionable under state law, the shipper’s selection of the broker is one analytical step away.
The Adams and Reese authors also predicted exactly how the litigation will unfold:
“In future litigation, brokers may point to the shipper’s role in the transaction, including what the shipper required, whether the shipper approved or rejected particular carriers, whether the shipper demanded expedited service that constrained carrier choice, and whether cost or speed was prioritized despite known safety concerns.”
That’s a roadmap. Brokers facing a negligent-selection claim now have every reason to drag the shipper in as a third-party defendant or a comparative-fault target. The shipper’s bid documents, routing guides, internal emails, and rate negotiations all become evidence. The internal email from the shipper’s procurement officer instructing the broker to “get me the cheapest truck that can move it by Friday” – that email is the case.
Adams and Reese’s recommendations to shippers are revealing precisely because they are recommendations defense lawyers are giving paying clients:
That last one is the tell. When defense counsel tells shippers to “avoid creating written records” of cost-over-safety decisions, they’re telling them the records that already exist are dangerous.
The shipper-liability theory isn’t new. Plaintiffs’ lawyers – including this firm – have been pursuing it for years.
In Knoten v. Westbrook, 193 So.3d 380 (La. App. 4th Cir. 2016), Blake Jones and I obtained one of the first Louisiana verdicts holding a shipper liable for a fatal trucking crash, with a total verdict exceeding $90 million. The facts had the shape of a negligent-selection case – the shipper hired a broker, who hired an unsafe carrier – and we pled negligent selection. But the theory that ultimately won, and the basis of the verdict, was that the shipper had taken control of the transportation. The shipper decided routing. The shipper met with the driver at the pickup site and required her to agree to the shipper’s terms before releasing the load. That conduct made the shipper a principal for vicarious-liability purposes – not just a passive contracting party. Knoten is a control-based theory of upstream shipper liability, and it remains good law.
Montgomery opens a separate, additive theory: negligent selection. A Louisiana plaintiff can now pursue both – control-based vicarious liability where the shipper crossed the line Knoten drew, and a direct negligent-selection claim against the shipper where the shipper picked a broker or carrier badly and a serious crash followed.
Chris Cotter of Roetzel & Andress – writing in the Winter 2023 USLAW Magazine – described how the shipper exposure has been growing for years:
“In light of the current environment of heightened verdicts in cases involving serious bodily injury or death arising out of truck accidents, claimants are now asserting claims not only against the truck driver and motor carrier, but also against entities that are ‘upstream’ from the motor carrier, such as the transportation broker and shipper.”
Cotter described the theory exactly:
“Claimants allege the broker was negligent in its selection of the motor carrier, and the shipper was negligent in its selection of the broker.”
Cotter wrote that piece as a defense lawyer warning his industry clients about the trend in 2023. Montgomery just removed the federal preemption shield he was telling them to rely on. The theory he described as a growing threat then is now substantially harder to defend.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers have been even more direct. Meryl Poulin of Gideon Asen, writing in 2023, laid out the playbook:
“Where the shipper hires a broker to screen the carrier on its behalf, two more potential theories of liability arise: the broker may be liable for negligent selection of the carrier, and the shipper may be liable for negligent selection of the broker.”
Poulin’s article also identifies the legal foundation that Montgomery implicitly endorses. Both broker and shipper duties arise under the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 411 – the duty to exercise reasonable care in selecting a competent and careful independent contractor. Section 411 doesn’t distinguish between brokers and shippers. It speaks to “an employer” who hires “a contractor.” A shipper that hires a broker is an employer hiring a contractor. The Supreme Court in Montgomery relied on that same common-law tort framework. It applies one level up.
Plaintiffs don’t have to prove a shipper personally vetted every carrier on every load. The theory is narrower and more workable than that.
A shipper that hires a broker has at minimum the duty to make a reasonable inquiry into whether that broker is competent to vet carriers. The questions a plaintiff’s lawyer will ask in discovery, derived from Poulin’s checklist and the post-Montgomery defense commentary:
Any one of those questions, answered badly, supports a negligent-selection claim against the shipper. The bid-process and rate-pressure questions are particularly dangerous. Those answers live in the shipper’s own procurement records. The shipper’s records become the plaintiff’s exhibits.
Cotter himself acknowledged the control-based argument back in 2023, noting that plaintiffs sometimes go further still, alleging the broker and shipper were “the employer of the truck driver.” That’s a vicarious liability theory layered on top of negligent selection. It’s harder to prove, but it doesn’t have to win on its own – pled in tandem, it forces the shipper to confront its degree of control over the load and the carrier as an evidentiary matter, not just a legal one.
C.H. Robinson’s own June 2026 update made a candid concession about the post-Montgomery landscape:
“This moves the industry away from a largely uniform federal framework toward a more fragmented system where liability standards may vary by state, introducing new complexity and uncertainty for brokers, shippers, and carriers.”
That’s true. And it cuts harder against shippers than against brokers, because shippers move freight across all fifty states. A national retailer or manufacturer that uses one set of broker agreements nationwide now has to assume that those agreements will be measured against fifty different state standards of reasonable care.
C.H. Robinson also acknowledged something that should focus every shipper’s general counsel:
“Companies may face increased litigation exposure tied to how they vet and select trucking carriers, with different interpretations of ‘reasonable care’ across jurisdictions.”
The “different interpretations” point matters. A shipper that meets a minimal reasonable-care standard in one state may fall well short of Louisiana’s. The shipper’s choice of broker – and that broker’s choice of carrier – will now be scrutinized through whichever state’s tort law governs the crash. Plaintiffs’ lawyers in Louisiana, including this firm, have every incentive to develop the doctrine aggressively.
Catastrophic trucking crashes routinely generate damages that exceed the federally required minimum motor-carrier insurance limits. Most non-hazardous carriers carry only the $750,000 minimum required by 49 C.F.R. Part 387. That number was set in 1980 and never indexed to inflation. It pays for almost nothing in a wrongful-death case involving an 18-wheeler.
The post-Montgomery commentary is explicit about the gap. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence noted that FAAAA requires minimum insurance for motor carriers but does not require minimum insurance for brokers – because brokers historically had no tort exposure to insure against. Montgomery changed that overnight. Brokers will now face higher contingent-liability premiums; some smaller brokers will exit the market entirely.
Shippers, by contrast, generally already carry substantial commercial general liability coverage and excess umbrella policies for ordinary business risks. Those policies typically cover negligent-selection exposure. Building a claim against a shipper means accessing real insurance – the kind that compensates families who have lost a parent, a spouse, or a child to a preventable trucking crash.
Stopping at the carrier in a serious case leaves money on the table. After Montgomery, stopping at the broker may do the same.
The Adams and Reese authors and the C.H. Robinson update converge on the same set of shipper action items. Audit broker agreements. Pull every routing guide and bid document. Allocate carrier-vetting responsibility in writing. Define minimum safety criteria. Document everything.
For shippers, that’s smart risk management. For plaintiffs’ lawyers, it doesn’t really matter whether shippers do this work or not.
If they do it well, the documents themselves become exhibits proving they understood the duty. The relevant question becomes whether they actually executed the policy on the specific load that caused the crash.
If they don’t do the work, the absence proves itself. No carrier-vetting policy. No routing-guide standard. No documentation. That void is its own evidence of negligent selection.
Either way, every shipper that contracts with brokers to move freight through Louisiana now has a documentary trail that will be subpoenaed in the next serious case. The shipper that gets ahead of it can defend itself. The shipper that doesn’t is going to learn the doctrine the hard way.
Plaintiffs file lawsuits under the law as it exists today. And the law as it exists today, in every state, now includes a Supreme Court ruling that the federal preemption defense for negligent-selection claims is dead.
Yes. The cause of action exists under Louisiana law, and Montgomery now eliminates the FAAAA preemption defense brokers had relied on to dismiss these claims at the pleading stage – a defense shippers had been borrowing by extension. Our firm tried Knoten v. Westbrook, 193 So.3d 380 (La. App. 4th Cir. 2016), to a verdict exceeding $90 million on a related but distinct theory: vicarious shipper liability based on the shipper’s control of the transportation. Negligent selection of the broker was pled in Knoten but was not the basis of the judgment. After Montgomery, a direct negligent-selection claim against a Louisiana shipper is materially stronger than it was when we tried Knoten.
Amazon and Wayfair filed an amicus brief asking the Court to hold that FAAAA preempts negligent-selection claims against shippers as well as brokers. They argued the same legal duty allegedly imposed on brokers was being imposed on shippers, that shippers were “increasingly targeted by the plaintiffs’ bar,” and that the preemption rule should cover both. The Court declined to do that. The ruling’s reasoning – that state-law claims concerning carrier safety are preserved by the FAAAA’s safety exception – applies just as cleanly to shippers as to brokers.
Bid documents, routing guides, broker agreements, internal emails about cost or transit-time pressure, the broker’s actual carrier-vetting records, the carrier’s FMCSA Company Snapshot at the time of dispatch, any documentation showing the shipper knew about a broker’s poor vetting record before contracting, and procurement-policy records. Adams and Reese specifically warned shippers about the “internal communications” risk – the email from a procurement officer pushing for cheaper trucks despite known safety concerns is the document plaintiffs will read to the jury.
No. Size matters less than the choice the shipper made. Any company that contracts with a freight broker to move goods can face the same duty of reasonable care in selecting that broker. Smaller shippers are often more exposed, not less – they typically have less rigorous procurement policies and less documentation of their carrier-vetting standards. Whether the shipper is Amazon or a regional manufacturer, the standard under Restatement (Second) of Torts § 411 is the same: reasonable care in selecting a competent and careful contractor.
Don’t give a recorded statement to any insurer. Photograph the cab door for the DOT number. Call an attorney quickly. The broker’s carrier-vetting records, the shipper’s bid and routing-guide documents, and the broker-shipper contract are all evidence – and they are evidence that doesn’t get preserved indefinitely once the wreck is over and the freight is delivered.
On the Land, on the Water or on the Roadways of America — We Will Fight for You.
If you or someone you love was hurt or killed in a crash involving a commercial truck – and a freight broker or shipper arranged the load – the evidence that proves the case up the chain is in someone else’s file cabinet right now. It doesn’t stay there forever.
Blake Jones Law Firm, LLC has been pursuing broker and shipper liability claims in Louisiana since before most courts recognized them. We’ve taken a broker-and-shipper case to a $90M+ verdict. We know what the records look like, what discovery to demand, and how to put every responsible party in front of the jury.
Call us at 504-525-4361 or contact us online for a free consultation. No fee unless we win.
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