The federal preemption shield that freight brokers leaned on for a decade is gone. On May 14, 2026, in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, the Supreme Court held unanimously that a negligent-hiring claim against a transportation broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. Justice Barrett wrote for the Court, with a concurrence from Justice Kavanaugh joined by Justice Alito. For plaintiff-side trucking lawyers, the decision reopens a defendant who often sits closer to deep insurance than the carrier that actually put an unsafe driver on the road.
The holding and why it matters
The dispute traced a familiar pattern. A broker, C.H. Robinson, arranged a load that moved on a carrier whose driver caused a catastrophic crash. The injured plaintiff sued the broker for negligently selecting that carrier, and the broker invoked FAAAA preemption, which bars state laws related to a broker's prices, routes, or services. Lower courts had split for years on whether the statute's safety exception, which preserves state authority over motor-vehicle safety, rescued these claims.
The Court resolved the split in the plaintiffs' favor. Requiring a broker to use ordinary care when choosing a carrier, the majority reasoned, is a regulation of safety with respect to motor vehicles, and the safety exception therefore applies. The negligent-hiring claim survives. The preemption defense that had been ending these cases in the Seventh and Eleventh Circuits no longer works, and within days a federal court of appeals vacated a broker's summary judgment and sent the case back in light of the ruling.
What this changes at intake
Add the broker to your early defendant analysis on every interstate trucking case. The carrier may be a thinly capitalized operation with a minimum policy, while the broker is a national company with real coverage and an interest in settling. To plead negligent selection that survives a motion to dismiss, you need facts about what the broker knew or should have known: the carrier's safety rating, its crash and inspection history, any authority revocations, and whether the broker checked them before tendering the load.
Much of that lives in public data. Pull the carrier's record from the FMCSA Safety Measurement System and its licensing and insurance history before you draft the complaint. A pattern of out-of-service violations or a lapsed authority that a reasonable broker would have caught is the spine of the claim. Our reporting on commercial trucking and motorcycle litigation has tracked how quickly defense firms are now papering their carrier-vetting files in response.
Preservation still wins or loses the case
Broker liability is a new lane, but the evidence that proves driver fault has not changed, and it disappears fast. The electronic logging device is the heart of any hours-of-service case. Under 49 C.F.R. Part 395, a property-carrying driver may drive up to eleven hours inside a fourteen-hour on-duty window after ten consecutive hours off. The ELD records duty status in a form that is hard to alter without leaving a trail, which makes it the best contemporaneous account of whether the driver was over hours when the crash happened.
The catch is retention. Carriers keep supporting ELD records for only six months, and some destroy unfavorable data the moment litigation looks likely. Send a preservation letter on day one and demand, with specificity:
- All ELD and supporting hours-of-service records, including the underlying engine and location data, not just the printed log summary.
- The truck itself and its onboard event-data and telematics systems before any repair or resale.
- Dispatch records, the driver qualification file, and the broker's carrier-selection documentation.
- Any data the carrier or broker would otherwise purge under its routine retention schedule.
Spell out that the letter triggers a duty to preserve and that destruction will support a spoliation instruction. An hours-of-service violation can establish negligence per se in many jurisdictions, so the records are not background detail; they are the case. When a defendant lets that data lapse after notice, the adverse-inference argument can be worth as much as the underlying violation.
The motorcycle wrinkle
For two-wheel cases the analysis shifts to comparative fault. Defense counsel reliably raise helmet use and lane-splitting to shave a plaintiff's recovery, and the strength of those arguments turns on state law. In comparative-negligence states a helmet defense may reduce damages tied to head injury but should not bar a claim built on a trucker's hours violation or a broker's reckless carrier choice. Keep the jury's attention on the commercial defendant's conduct rather than letting the case become a referendum on the rider.
The through line across truck and motorcycle work is unchanged: move first on preservation, build the liability file from public safety data, and keep the best-funded defendant in the case. Montgomery hands plaintiffs a defendant they were often denied, and our continuing case-law and settlement coverage will follow how trial courts apply it. The firms that benefit will be the ones that already treat the first forty-eight hours after a crash as the part of the case they cannot get back.