On April 29, 2026, during C.H. Robinson’s first-quarter earnings call, CEO Dave Bozeman told his investors exactly what they wanted to hear.
“The Montgomery case is a case that we expect to win.”
Sixteen days later, the Supreme Court of the United States proved him wrong. All nine justices.
In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided May 14, the Court did not split along ideological lines, did not produce a fractured plurality, and did not leave the issue muddled for lower courts to fight over. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately. Every justice signed on to the result. The freight brokerage industry’s preferred reading of federal law – the one that let brokers arrange loads, collect fees, and walk away clean when their carrier choices put people in the ground – is now unanimously, unambiguously dead.
Most people have never heard of a freight broker. That is precisely the problem. A freight broker is the company paid to decide which trucking carrier hauls a given load. They do not own the trucks. They do not employ the drivers. They make one consequential choice – which carrier gets on the road – and until last week in Illinois, they bore none of the legal risk when that choice went catastrophically wrong.
For Illinois plaintiffs and the attorneys who represent them, the era of the broker shell game is over.
What the Court Held
On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that freight brokers can be held liable under state law for negligently hiring unsafe carriers. The Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act does not preempt those claims. The Seventh Circuit’s contrary precedent – which had been blocking these suits in Illinois since 2023 – is reversed.
The Man C.H. Robinson’s Legal Strategy Left Without Recourse
On December 7, 2017, Shawn Montgomery pulled his rig onto the westbound shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois to check a mechanical problem. While he stood outside his truck, a Caribe Transport II tractor-trailer traveling at highway speed veered off the road and struck him. Shawn lost his leg. The disfigurement is permanent.
The load Caribe was hauling that day had been arranged by C.H. Robinson – the largest freight broker in the country, managing 37 million shipments annually. Before booking a carrier, brokers have full access to the federal SAFER database, which publishes carrier safety ratings, crash histories, inspection records, and driver qualification data. Shawn alleged that C.H. Robinson knew, or should have known, that Caribe held a “conditional” FMCSA safety rating and had documented driver-qualification failures. C.H. Robinson booked them anyway.
When Shawn sued, C.H. Robinson did not argue that it had exercised reasonable care. It argued that it did not have to.
How the FAAAA Became a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card
The Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 – the FAAAA – was passed to deregulate the trucking industry’s pricing and routing. Its purpose was economic. Freight brokers, creative in their use of federal statutes, found a second application: a preemption argument that state-law negligence claims against brokers were “related to” their “services,” and therefore nullified by federal law.
The Seventh Circuit – the federal appellate court covering Illinois – accepted this argument in its 2023 Ye v. GlobalTranz decision. After Ye, Illinois federal courts dismissed broker defendants from trucking injury cases with regularity. Shawn Montgomery’s claims against C.H. Robinson were dismissed by the district court in November 2023. The Seventh Circuit affirmed that dismissal in January 2025.
The argument was always weaker than it looked. The same statute brokers were invoking contained an explicit carve-out: the preemption clause “shall not restrict the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” Brokers countered that this exception did not apply to them because their choices are about arranging services, not operating vehicles.
Justice Barrett’s eight-page opinion dispatched that reading without ceremony. Requiring a broker to use ordinary care when selecting a carrier – to check whether the company it is about to send down an Illinois highway has a conditional federal safety rating – is regulation “with respect to motor vehicles.” Trucks are, in fact, motor vehicles. That the preemption clause targets a broker’s services does not mean safety regulation of how brokers choose those carriers falls outside it.
Justice Kavanaugh made the equity point plainly in his concurrence. Federal law imposes no meaningful obligation on brokers to vet the carriers they hire. FMCSA regulates carriers. Nobody regulates what brokers do before they book one. A ruling in favor of C.H. Robinson would have left brokers operating in, as Kavanaugh put it, “a black hole” – generating revenue from freight arrangement with no legal accountability for whose truck ended up on the road.
“If brokers can be held liable for disregarding poor safety records, they have a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable motor carriers.”
- Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II
That incentive now exists.
What Montgomery v. Caribe Changes for Illinois Trucking Accident Cases
The Seventh Circuit’s Ye decision had a specific and damaging effect on Illinois catastrophic trucking litigation: it removed the deepest pocket from the case.
The federal minimum liability insurance for a commercial motor carrier is $750,000. Congress set that number in 1980. It has never been adjusted for inflation. In catastrophic personal injury cases – a traumatic brain injury, a spinal cord injury, a wrongful death – that policy is frequently exhausted before the full scope of the harm is even calculated. The carrier is tapped out. Under Ye, the broker walked.
Under Montgomery, the broker stays in the case – and the broker’s carrier-vetting records become central evidence. What did C.H. Robinson, or whatever broker arranged the load, actually do before booking this carrier? Did it run a SAFER query? Did it review the carrier’s BASIC percentile scores in Unsafe Driving, Driver Fitness, or Vehicle Maintenance? Did it have any documented process at all, or did it simply book the cheapest available truck? Every one of those questions is now subject to discovery.
Montgomery also does not stand alone in Illinois. The Sperl v. C.H. Robinson decision – an Illinois trucking crash that produced a judgment exceeding $28 million – established that brokers can be held liable under an agency theory when they exercise sufficient operational control over a driver. Sperl survived the Ye era because it sounded in agency, not negligent hiring. Montgomery cements a second, independent theory. In Illinois catastrophic trucking litigation, plaintiffs now have both.
If you were injured in a trucking accident in Illinois and the broker who arranged the load is not named in your case, it may be worth finding out why. We can help evaluate that.
The Industry Response and Why It Does Not Hold Up
Following the ruling, C.H. Robinson issued a statement affirming its “industry-leading carrier-selection processes” and its commitment to highway safety. The Transportation Intermediaries Association, the freight broker trade group, was less diplomatic. President and CEO Chris Burroughs called the decision “an impossible task,” arguing that brokers lack access to the records necessary to evaluate carrier safety.
“Since brokers do not employ motor carrier drivers directly, they do not have access to the records and data required to perform the safety functions that plaintiff lawyers contend they must.”
- Chris Burroughs, President and CEO, Transportation Intermediaries Association
This is worth examining. The federal government publishes carrier safety ratings, inspection histories, crash rates, hours-of-service compliance records, and driver-qualification data in a database called SAFER. It is publicly accessible. Any broker with a USDOT number and an internet connection can retrieve it in under a minute. The argument that C.H. Robinson – a company that manages 37 million shipments annually using technology it describes as “industry-leading” – lacks access to data published by the federal government is not a serious operational claim. It is a description of a deliberate choice not to look.
The Supreme Court, unanimously, has decided that choice has consequences.
The Freight Broker Shell Game, Retired
For years, the freight brokerage industry used the FAAAA as a liability laundromat. Arrange the load. Collect the fee. When the carrier you chose causes a catastrophic crash, invoke federal preemption, exit the litigation, and leave the victim fighting over a $750,000 policy that Congress set when gas cost eighty cents a gallon.
That structure is now gone in every federal jurisdiction in the country.
Brokers in Illinois face discovery on their carrier-selection practices for the first time. The data they had access to before booking a carrier with a conditional safety rating is now exhibit evidence. The absence of a documented vetting process is itself a fact the jury will hear.
Dave Bozeman told his investors the company expected to win. The Supreme Court told him, and every freight broker operating in Illinois, exactly where accountability now sits.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. The application of Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II to any specific case depends on facts and circumstances that require individualized attorney review. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Written by Kyler W. Juckins, Partner, Block Law – Illinois.
