On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238 that fundamentally changed the liability landscape for freight brokers across the country. The Court held that state-law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) because they fall within the statute's safety exception, which preserves state authority to regulate safety "with respect to motor vehicles." The opinion was authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, with a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined by Justice Samuel Alito. For motor carriers, the practical consequence is direct: your FMCSA safety data — your safety rating, out-of-service rates, and the underlying inspection and crash data that feeds your CSA scores — will be under the microscope more than ever before.
What Actually Happened in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport
Shawn Montgomery was stopped on the side of an Illinois highway when a Mack truck driven by Yosniel Varela-Mojena veered off course and struck his tractor-trailer. Montgomery's leg had to be amputated, and he sustained other severe and permanent injuries. Varela-Mojena was operating for motor carrier Caribe Transport II, LLC, and that load had been coordinated by freight broker C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., the nation's largest freight broker. Montgomery's lawsuit alleged that Caribe Transport carried a "conditional" safety rating from the FMCSA at the time C.H. Robinson hired it, and that the carrier had documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, inspection and maintenance, and crash rate.
The District Court dismissed Montgomery's claim on the grounds that the FAAAA preempted it. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, applying its own precedent from Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, Inc., 74 F.4th 453 (2023). The Supreme Court reversed. Justice Barrett's analysis turned on a straightforward textual question: does a negligent hiring claim against a broker concern motor vehicles? The Court said yes, holding that requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier "concerns" motor vehicles because those trucks are what physically go onto the highway and cause harm when the selection is negligent. The judgment of the Seventh Circuit was reversed and the case remanded.
The circuit split that had allowed brokers in different parts of the country to operate under fundamentally different liability regimes is now resolved. The Seventh Circuit's Ye v. GlobalTranz line and the Eleventh Circuit's Aspen American Insurance decision — the freight industry's principal preemption defenses — are no longer good law. Montgomery controls nationwide for interstate shipments.
Two Important Limits the Court Did Set
The ruling does not make brokers automatically liable for every accident involving a carrier they dispatched. The standard remains ordinary negligence. Plaintiffs must still prove that the broker failed to act reasonably under the circumstances and that the failure contributed to the harm. Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence, joined by Justice Alito, put it plainly: brokers who perform due diligence, ask the hard questions, and hire carriers with proven safety records should still be able to defend these cases successfully. The goal of the ruling is accountability for negligent selection, not strict liability for market participation.
The ruling also has a geographic boundary. It applies to interstate shipments governed by 49 U.S.C. §14501(c), which contains the safety exception. Negligent-selection claims arising from intrastate broker services remain preempted under §14501(b)(1), which has no safety exception. Brokers coordinating intrastate movements are not touched by this ruling. For the vast majority of freight brokerage, which is interstate, the preemption defense is gone.
The Safety Data That Will Be Exhibit A in Every Post-Montgomery Case
The Court's opinion did not exist in a vacuum. It turned on publicly available federal safety data, the same data FMCSA has maintained for years and that brokers can access with nothing more than a DOT number. Understanding what that data says about your fleet is no longer optional. For an in-depth look at this topic, check out our prior article, 5 Enforcement Metrics Carriers MUST Track.
Official Safety Ratings: Satisfactory, Conditional, and Unsatisfactory
The metric front and center in Montgomery was Caribe Transport's "conditional" safety rating. Safety ratings are formal evaluations of a motor carrier's compliance with the safety fitness standard described in 49 CFR Part 385, Appendix B. They are issued only after a comprehensive on-site or off-site compliance review. As we have covered in depth at Trucksafe, what each safety rating actually means and how it is assigned is something every carrier should understand before FMCSA comes knocking.
The three possible ratings break down as follows. A Satisfactory rating means the carrier has functional and adequate safety management controls to meet the standard in 49 CFR 385.5. A Conditional rating, the one Caribe Transport held, means the carrier does not have adequate safety management controls, creating conditions that could result in the violations listed in §385.5(a) through (k). An Unsatisfactory rating is a preliminary determination that the carrier is unfit to continue operating in interstate commerce, triggering the prohibition provisions in 49 CFR 385.13 after 45 to 60 days if deficiencies are not corrected. Carriers that are Unrated have not yet undergone a comprehensive compliance review, and that currently describes the overwhelming majority of interstate carriers operating today.
If you have a Conditional rating right now, your profile looks almost identical to Caribe Transport's on the day C.H. Robinson dispatched the load that ended Shawn Montgomery's career. That is not a comfortable place to be when brokers under litigation pressure are deciding which carriers to put on their approved lists. If you are working through a Conditional rating, our guide to the safety rating upgrade process walks through exactly what corrective action looks like and how to petition FMCSA for a rating improvement.
Out of Service Rates
Out-of-service rates, which are publicly available on each carrier’s SAFER profile, indicate how frequently a carrier’s vehicles and drivers are being placed out of service (i.e., prohibited from operating) for serious violations during roadside inspections. As we detailed in a previous article, out of service rates are one of five critical safety metrics that fleets should be closely monitoring and working to improve. High rates can lead to increased enforcement, higher insurance premiums, and lost business.
CSA BASIC Scores
Most carriers, particularly newer ones, are Unrated, meaning no formal compliance review has been conducted. Being Unrated does not mean being invisible. FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (SMS) calculates CSA scores using roadside inspection, crash, and investigation data from the prior 24 months. That said, it's worth understanding what brokers can actually see. Due to restrictions under the FAST Act, the percentile scores generated by FMCSA's Safety Measurement System are not publicly available for property carriers, only the carrier itself can view them by logging in with its DOT PIN. What is publicly available is the underlying data: your inspection history, violation records, and crash data. Brokers doing their due diligence may work from that raw data directly, or they may use one of the third-party platforms that simulate CSA-style scores from it. Either way, that data tells a story, and after this ruling, brokers have a strong legal incentive to read it carefully.
As we have explained in prior Trucksafe content, the seven BASICs are: Unsafe Driving, Crash Indicator, Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance, Vehicle Maintenance, Controlled Substances/Alcohol, Driver Fitness, and Hazardous Materials Compliance. Each carrier's performance in these categories is expressed as a percentile score from 0 to 100, with higher percentiles indicating worse performance relative to peers in the same safety event group.
Three of the seven BASICs carry a lower intervention threshold because FMCSA's analysis found they have a stronger correlation to crash risk: Unsafe Driving, HOS Compliance, and Crash Indicator. For general freight carriers, the intervention threshold for those three BASICs is 65 percentile. The remaining BASICs — Driver Fitness, Vehicle Maintenance, and Controlled Substances — carry a threshold of 80 percentile. Scores at or above these thresholds put a carrier in FMCSA's prioritization queue for warning letters, focused investigations, and compliance reviews.
What Discovery in a Post-Montgomery Case Will Actually Look Like
With the preemption defense gone, brokers can no longer expect an early exit from litigation through motions to dismiss. They will participate in full pre-trial discovery, and those discovery requests will be highly specific. Plaintiffs' attorneys will seek the FMCSA safety data the broker had access to on the date of dispatch, the broker's written carrier vetting policies (or the conspicuous absence of them), internal approval and "do not use" lists, email and text communications related to carrier selection, and the broker's history of dispatching the same carrier on prior loads. If a broker lacks written vetting standards, that absence is itself evidence. If the broker's process consisted of confirming active authority and nothing more, that process may not survive cross-examination.
For motor carriers, the litigation wave matters beyond the obvious fact that a crash involving your equipment could name your broker as a co-defendant. It matters because brokers under litigation pressure will make freight allocation decisions differently. The clearest economic consequence of Montgomery is that brokers now have a direct financial incentive to dispatch only carriers they can defensibly select. Carriers with clean safety profiles, documented safety programs, and no elevated compliance metrics become the defensible choice. Carriers with Conditional ratings, high out-of-service rates, etc. become the risk a broker's legal team will tell them to avoid.
What You Should Do Now?
The practical question for every motor carrier reading this is simple: if a plaintiff's attorney pulled your FMCSA safety profile tomorrow, what would it show? Pull your own data first through FMCSA's SAFER system and through the SMS portal using your and review it the way a vetting broker or opposing counsel would.
Check your safety rating on SAFER. If you are Conditional, begin the corrective action and upgrade petition process immediately. A Conditional rating is the single most damaging data point in a post-Montgomery vetting review, and it signals to brokers that you carry the same profile Caribe Transport did on the day C.H. Robinson dispatched their load.
Log in to SMS and pull your roadside data and CSA scores. Scores at or above the intervention thresholds (65 percentile for Unsafe Driving, HOS, and Crash Indicator; 80 percentile for Driver Fitness, Vehicle Maintenance, and Controlled Substances) and patterns of violations are data points brokers will scrutinize.
Address the violations driving your elevated BASICs. High scores in Vehicle Maintenance often trace to identifiable roadside inspection patterns ( brake violations, lighting defects, tire issues) that a disciplined pre-trip and inspection program can directly reduce. High HOS scores frequently reflect ELD configuration problems or dispatch practices that can be corrected. Work backward from the violations, not forward from the score.
Document your safety program in writing. Post-Montgomery, carriers that can demonstrate to a broker, or to a court, that they operate a structured, documented safety management program are in a materially better position than carriers that rely on informal practices. Your driver qualification files, vehicle inspection records, drug and alcohol testing documentation, and safety policies should all be current and audit-ready.
Challenge incorrect inspection violations through DataQs. Inaccurate roadside inspection data drives up BASIC scores. If you have violations on your SMS record that were issued in error, file a DataQs request to have them reviewed. Removing erroneous data improves your scores and removes a data point that could otherwise appear in discovery as a supposed "red flag."
Consider how your profile looks to a vetting broker. Tools like Trucksafe's CarrierVet allow brokers, and carriers, to see a comprehensive compliance profile the same way a sophisticated vetting operation would see it. Running your own profile through CarrierVet gives you a frank picture of where you stand and what a broker's compliance team will flag before deciding whether to put you on their approved carrier list.
If your safety rating needs to be upgraded, act quickly. The FMCSA upgrade petition process requires demonstrating that you have substantially corrected the deficiencies that caused the downgrade. Given that FMCSA may take several months to rule on an upgrade request, carriers sitting on a Conditional rating should not wait for their broker relationships to deteriorate before filing. Review our detailed walkthrough of the upgrade process if you need guidance on how to structure that petition.
What Comes Next?
The first wave of post-Montgomery negligent hiring suits against brokers was expected within weeks of the May 14 ruling. Plaintiffs' attorneys who had been building case files against brokers for years, waiting for the preemption defense to fall, were ready to move. Insurance markets for brokers will take time to respond and adjust. Broker vetting standards, carrier contract language, and liability coverage terms are all likely to evolve significantly over the coming months as the industry works out what "reasonable care in carrier selection" actually requires in practice.
The ruling also raises questions that the Court's opinion did not address. Shipper liability on negligent-selection theories, the argument that a shipper who selected the broker is also responsible, was not before the Court, though the doctrinal logic of the opinion does not stop at the broker. Other broker liability theories, including vicarious liability and agency theories, also remain open questions that will be tested in lower courts. Montgomery opened a door; it did not define the full scope of what may eventually walk through it.
For now, carriers need to take stock of their current compliance posture and work to improve it if they want to remain competitive.
