7 Steps to Freight Broker Negligent Hiring Protection After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport

By Ezequiel "Zeke" Moya, Jr. | Partner | Roerig, Oliveira & Fisher, LLP

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that removed the federal legal shield freight brokers have relied on for over thirty years. The ruling is straightforward: state negligent-hiring claims against transportation brokers are no longer blocked by federal preemption law. These lawsuits now go forward in every state, in every court, on the merits.

The day after Montgomery, the Texas Supreme Court issued its own decision in In re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. — giving Texas brokers and shippers a strong but conditional defense under state common law. That defense does not apply automatically. It has to be earned. And the way you earn it is by building the right business practices before an accident happens, not after.

This post is for freight brokers, drayage operators, trucking companies, and shippers who want to understand what changed and, more importantly, exactly what to do about it.

What Changed and Why It Matters to Your Business

Before Montgomery, if someone sued a freight broker for negligently hiring a dangerous trucking company, the broker could argue that federal law — the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, or FAAAA — blocked that lawsuit before it ever got started. Courts in much of the country were throwing these cases out at the pleading stage. The defense was fast, cheap, and decisive.

That defense is gone. Permanently. By a nine-to-zero Supreme Court vote with no dissent.

What replaced it is state tort law, which means the exposure varies by state, the standard is defined by juries, and the cost of defending even a winning case can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. In Texas, In re Home Depot gives businesses a fighting chance — but only if they can demonstrate they did their homework before putting a carrier on the road.

The case that drove this change tells you everything you need to know about what the homework looks like.

C.H. Robinson — one of the largest freight brokers in the United States — had a written carrier agreement with Caribe Transport II that included safety requirements. According to the complaint filed by the injured plaintiff, C.H. Robinson allegedly never verified a single one of them. They never pulled Caribe's federal safety profile. They never requested driver qualification files. They never checked Caribe's out-of-service rates — which were, according to the complaint, twice the national average. Caribe held a "conditional" safety rating from the federal government at the time of hire, meaning regulators had already flagged the carrier for problems across multiple safety categories.

C.H. Robinson had a contract. According to the complaint, they did not have a file. A jury will decide what that means.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your business is not in the same position.

7 Steps to Freight Broker Negligent Hiring Protection Starting Today

Step 1: Check Every Carrier's Safety Rating — Every Single Time

The single most important habit you can build right now costs nothing and takes sixty seconds.

Before you hire any trucking company, look them up on the free federal database at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov. Search by the carrier's name, DOT number, or MC number. Look for four things: their operating authority status (active or not), their safety rating (satisfactory, conditional, or unsatisfactory), their insurance filing, and their out-of-service rates.

The rating categories matter:

• A satisfactory rating means the carrier passed federal safety review. This is your strongest foundation for the Home Depot reliance defense in Texas — you checked, the government certified them, and you relied on that certification.

  
  

• An unrated carrier has simply not yet been through a formal compliance review. More than 90 percent of motor carriers registered with FMCSA currently operate without a safety rating. Unrated is not automatically dangerous, but it means you need to do additional homework — insurance verification, inspection history, and crash records at minimum.

  
  

• A conditional rating means federal regulators have already found and documented safety problems with this carrier. Hiring a conditional-rated carrier is the fact pattern that drove Montgomery all the way to the Supreme Court. If something goes wrong with a conditional-rated carrier, you will have a very difficult time explaining why you hired them.

  
  

• An unsatisfactory rating means the carrier has failed federal safety review. Do not use them.

  
  

• Write down what you found and when you checked it. The date-stamped record of your vetting is as important as the vetting itself. If you cannot show you checked, courts treat it the same as not checking.

Step 2: Pull the FMCSA Company Safety Profile — Not Just the Rating

The safety rating on safer.fmcsa.dot.gov is the starting point, not the finish line.

For carriers you use regularly or for any new carrier you are considering, pull a Company Safety Profile from the FMCSA's Motor Carrier Management Information System — the MCMIS database. This report gives you a more complete picture of the carrier's inspection history, out-of-service violations, crash data, and safety measurement scores.

This is the exact report the Montgomery complaint alleges C.H. Robinson never pulled on Caribe Transport. Had they pulled it, they would have found a carrier with out-of-service rates twice the national average and a documented history of problems across multiple safety categories.

The Company Safety Profile is available through the FMCSA's DataQs system or through commercial carrier monitoring services. Pull it. Print it. Put it in the file. Date it.

Step 3: Build a Carrier File and Keep It Current

A carrier file is not a complicated thing. It is a folder — paper or digital — that contains the documentation showing you did your homework before putting that carrier on the road.

At minimum your carrier file should contain:

The carrier's FMCSA authority certificate confirming valid operating authority at time of hire. The carrier's insurance certificate showing current, compliant coverage. The results of your safer.fmcsa.dot.gov safety rating check, with the date. The FMCSA Company Safety Profile, with the date. Driver qualification information for the specific driver assigned to your load, if available. A copy of your carrier agreement or load confirmation. Any communications with the carrier about the specific shipment.

C.H. Robinson had a carrier agreement with Caribe Transport. According to the complaint, that was essentially all they had. The agreement included safety requirements — requirements they allegedly never verified. A jury will hear that they knew what due diligence required because they wrote it into the contract, and then did not do it.

A contract without a carrier file is not a defense. In the hands of a skilled plaintiff's attorney, it becomes evidence that you knew the standard and chose not to meet it.

Step 4: Review Your Carrier Contracts — Both What They Say and What You Actually Do

Your carrier agreement serves two functions that are now in tension with each other.

On the one hand it protects you by establishing that the carrier is an independent contractor responsible for its own safety compliance, driver qualifications, hours of service, and equipment maintenance. That independent contractor language is central to the In re Home Depot defense under Texas law.

On the other hand every safety requirement you write into that contract defines the standard you will be held to. If your agreement requires carriers to maintain qualified drivers, comply with hours of service rules, and keep equipment in good repair — and you never verify any of it — you have documented that you knew what was required and chose not to check.

C.H. Robinson's carrier agreement with Caribe Transport required safety compliance across multiple categories. The complaint alleges they monitored none of it. That is not a defense. That is a roadmap for the plaintiff's lawyer.

Have a transportation attorney review both your contract language and your actual compliance process together. The question is not whether the contract says the right things. The question is whether your business practices match what the contract requires.

Step 5: Understand the Difference Between Control and Safety Verification

One of the most important concepts in the post-Montgomery world is the distinction between exercising operational control over a carrier — which creates liability — and conducting safety verification before hiring a carrier — which creates a defense.

Under In re Home Depot, a shipper or broker who exercises operational control over how a carrier does its work loses the independent contractor protection. Dictating routes, pressuring drivers on delivery timing, micromanaging loads, or communicating directly with drivers about how to perform the work — these are the kinds of facts that plaintiff's lawyers will argue constitute assumed control.

Safety verification before hire is different. Checking a carrier's rating, pulling their safety profile, reviewing their driver qualification files, and documenting what you found — none of that is control. All of it is prudent business practice that supports the reliance defense.

The line to remember: your job is to verify before you hire. It is not to supervise after you do. A broker who checks a carrier's safety record carefully and then steps aside is in a fundamentally different legal position than a broker who puts safety requirements in a contract and then monitors daily operations.

Do the verification. Document it. Then let the independent contractor do the work.

Step 6: Call Your Insurance Broker and Ask the Right Questions

The Montgomery decision changed your risk profile in ways that your current insurance coverage may not reflect.

For freight brokers specifically: many contingent liability and broker liability policies were structured and priced during a period when FAAAA preemption provided a near-complete defense to negligent-hiring claims in most major jurisdictions. That defense is gone. Your policy's exposure is now higher, and the premium that was charged may not have accounted for full merits litigation on every negligent-hiring claim.

Call your insurance broker this week. Ask specifically:

• Does my policy cover negligent-hiring claims against me as a broker?

• Was this coverage priced with the assumption that preemption would knock out most of these claims? Has the carrier reviewed the policy in light of Montgomery?

• Do I have adequate limits for full merits litigation, including discovery, expert witnesses, and potential trial?

For trucking companies: your exposure for negligent hiring of drivers and independent owner-operators follows a parallel but distinct track. The Montgomery decision does not directly govern carrier-to-driver relationships, but the same underlying negligent-hiring principles apply under state law. If you hire drivers or lease-on owner-operators, make sure your driver qualification process is documented and that your insurance covers negligent-hiring claims arising from those decisions.

The risk profile changed on May 14, 2026. Your coverage needs to reflect that change.

Step 7: Build a Relationship With a Transportation Attorney Before You Need One

The best time to talk to a transportation defense attorney is before an accident happens — not after.

A one-hour consultation with counsel who handles trucking defense can accomplish several things that would otherwise take months and significant expense to address after a claim arises. Counsel can review your carrier agreements and flag language that creates unintended exposure. Counsel can evaluate your carrier vetting process and identify gaps that a plaintiff's lawyer would target. Counsel can assess whether your corporate structure properly allocates risk between entities — a particularly important issue for cross-border operators in the Rio Grande Valley where a single business may have U.S. and Mexican entities performing related functions. And counsel can make sure your insurance coverage matches the actual risk your business now carries in a post-Montgomery world.

The Montgomery complaint tells you exactly what the plaintiff's lawyer is going to look for when something goes wrong: the carrier agreement, the vetting records, the safety profile pulls, the driver qualification files, and every communication about the specific shipment. A transportation attorney can help you make sure those documents, when they are eventually requested, tell the story of a business that did its homework — not a business that had a contract and nothing else.

A Note for Cross-Border Operators in the Rio Grande Valley

If your business arranges transportation across the Texas-Mexico border — whether as a drayage broker, a customs broker who also coordinates U.S.-side transportation, or a shipper using Mexican carriers on U.S. roads — Montgomery raises an additional layer of issues specific to cross-border operations.

The In re Home Depot reliance defense depends on the carrier holding valid, current FMCSA operating authority. A Mexican carrier operating in the United States must hold that authority — the same as any domestic carrier. If your cross-border carrier does not have valid, current FMCSA authority, the reliance defense is unavailable to you entirely, regardless of how carefully you vetted everything else.

Verify FMCSA operating authority on every cross-border carrier you use on the U.S. side. Not just at onboarding — before every load. Authority can lapse, be revoked, or be issued under one entity name when the carrier is operating under another. A carrier without valid U.S. authority is the single highest-risk fact pattern in a cross-border negligent-hiring case.

Additionally, the entity in your supply chain that actually arranges for the U.S.-side carrier — whoever makes the call and executes the agreement — is the entity that carries the Montgomery exposure. In cross-border maquiladora supply chains, the company on the shipping paperwork is not always the company that arranged the transportation. Make sure the entity with the exposure has the documentation and the insurance to match.

The Bottom Line

The Montgomery decision did not create the duty to exercise reasonable care in selecting carriers. That duty has always existed under common law. What Montgomery did was remove the procedural shield that kept these lawsuits from being heard on the merits. Now they are heard. And the outcome depends entirely on what your business did — and what it can prove it did — before the accident happened.

In Texas, In re Home Depot gives you a real defense. A carrier with valid FMCSA authority and a satisfactory safety rating. No operational control over the carrier's work. No affirmative acts that created the risk. And a file that proves all of it.

C.H. Robinson had a contract. According to the complaint, they did not have a file. Do not make the same mistake.

The seven steps above are not complicated, and most of them cost very little. What they require is consistency — the same process, every carrier, every load, every time. That consistency, documented and maint

ained, is what separates a business that wins the Home Depot defense from one that ends up as the next case study in a conference presentation.

Ezequiel "Zeke" Moya, Jr. is a partner at Roerig, Oliveira & Fisher, LLP in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. His practice focuses on commercial trucking and motor carrier defense, insurance defense, cross-border transportation litigation, and third-party claims administration throughout South Texas and the Texas-Mexico corridor. He represents brokers, carriers, shippers, and insurers in matters arising from commercial vehicle accidents, negligent-hiring claims, and FMCSA regulatory compliance.

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. If you have questions about your specific carrier vetting process, contract language, or coverage structure in light of the Montgomery decision, contact a qualified transportation attorney.