Freight Broker Truck Accident Claims

Much of American trucking runs on a three-party structure you cannot see from the road. A shipper has goods. A motor carrier has trucks. Between them sits a broker, which federal law defines as a person, other than a motor carrier, that sells or arranges transportation by motor carrier for compensation. The Supreme Court put it more plainly: brokers are the transportation industry's matchmakers, and roughly 28,000 of them arrange the movement of about a third of all freight shipped in the United States, drawing on a pool of more than 780,000 carriers.

The largest broker describes its own operation candidly. C.H. Robinson tells its investors that it owns very little transportation equipment and does not employ the people directly involved with delivering its customers' freight, with more than 450,000 transportation providers on its platform. Uber Freight's parent describes the business as a platform connecting shippers with carriers, and elsewhere in the same filing calls the activity freight brokerage.

So when a brokered load is involved in your crash, the company whose decision put that particular truck on the road may have no truck, no driver, and no visible presence anywhere near the scene. What it had was the choice.

For three years, that choice was very difficult to challenge in the two states this firm serves.

The Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, the FAAAA, forbids states to enforce any law related to a price, route, or service of any motor carrier or any broker with respect to the transportation of property. Brokers argued that a negligence verdict is such a law, and that argument worked. In Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, the Seventh Circuit held in 2023 that a widow's negligent-hiring claim over the death of her husband struck at the core of the broker's services and was preempted. The Eleventh Circuit had reached the same conclusion months earlier in Aspen American Insurance v. Landstar Ranger, reasoning that a claim against a broker is necessarily one step removed from a motor vehicle.

Illinois sits in the Seventh Circuit and Florida in the Eleventh. Under those two decisions, an injured person in either state could pursue the trucking company and its driver, while the company that selected them stood behind a federal wall. The Ninth Circuit had gone the other way in 2020, the Sixth Circuit later joined it, and the Supreme Court declined twice to resolve the disagreement before finally taking it up.

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, and the wall came down. The Court was unanimous.

The case began as these cases do. C.H. Robinson brokered a load to a carrier whose federal safety rating was conditional at the relevant time. The carrier's truck struck Robert Montgomery's tractor-trailer in Illinois, and he lost his leg. The Seventh Circuit, following its own rule from Ye, held the claim preempted, and the Supreme Court reversed.

The decision turns on the statute's safety exception, which preserves the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles. Justice Barrett's opinion holds that a claim qualifies if it concerns the vehicles used in transportation, and that requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier plainly concerns the trucks that will carry the goods. The Court noted that common-law duties have always formed part of a state's authority to regulate safety.

The practical consequence for this firm's two states is direct. The decision reversed the Seventh Circuit rule that bound Illinois federal courts and displaced the Eleventh Circuit rule that bound Florida's. As of mid-2026, an injured person in either state may bring a negligent-selection claim against the broker that arranged the load.

A negligent-selection claim asks a narrow and answerable question: what did the broker know, or what should it have known, about the carrier it chose?

The materials for that question exist because carrier safety is documented. Federal safety ratings, crash histories, out-of-service rates and authority records live in systems the industry itself uses. In Montgomery's underlying facts, the selected carrier held a conditional federal safety rating at the relevant time. A broker's own records matter too — what it checked, when it checked, and what its selection standards required.

You should also hear the limiting side, because the Supreme Court said it out loud. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring, wrote that brokers who act reasonably and arrange transportation with reputable carriers should successfully defend these suits, and that ordinary proximate-cause requirements protect brokers from excessive liability. Montgomery settles that the courtroom door is open. It does not make the case inside easy.

What the decision does create is an incentive structure the concurrence itself describes: a broker that can be held answerable for disregarding poor safety records has a strong reason to do business only with safe carriers. The claim, where the facts support it, is how that incentive reaches a particular family's case.

People sometimes assume a broker carries crash insurance the way a trucking company must. The federal structure says otherwise, and the difference is worth understanding before anyone relies on it.

Federal registration requires each broker to maintain financial security of $75,000, typically filed as a surety bond on Form BMC-84. Read what that bond secures: payments to shippers and motor carriers if the broker fails to carry out its contracts for supplying transportation. It is protection for freight bills. Motor carriers are the parties Congress required to hold liability insurance against bodily injury and death arising from the operation of their vehicles.

That structure explains why the carrier's policy answers first for the crash itself. It also explains why broker liability matters most in the cases where the carrier's coverage is thin. The federal minimums date from decades ago, a catastrophic injury exhausts them quickly, and a small carrier can be judgment-proof beyond its policy. The facts behind Ye are the sober illustration: the widow in that case held a ten-million-dollar default judgment against the carrier itself, and the question that reached the court of appeals was whether the broker could be sued at all.

A properly built case identifies every layer — the carrier's insurance, the broker's conduct, and any shipper-side responsibility — before deciding where the recovery actually lives.

If this structure fits your crash, the next steps are concrete.

Find out early whether a broker arranged the load. The answer is in the freight documents: rate confirmations, load tenders, and bills of lading name the parties. None of it is visible from the crash scene, and the trucking company's name on the door tells you nothing about who selected that company.

Preserve the selection record. What the broker knew about the carrier — ratings, crash history, prior dealings, internal vetting standards — is the heart of the claim, and it lives in records that routine litigation holds can reach. The carrier's own safety file should be preserved at the same time.

Keep the carrier claim at the center. Montgomery adds a defendant; it subtracts nothing. The driver's negligence and the motor carrier's own conduct — its hiring and training, its supervision and maintenance — remain the foundation of the case, with the broker claim built alongside.

Treat the law's newness as a reason for care, and the old deadlines as unchanged. The ordinary Illinois and Florida filing deadlines run while the broker question is being worked out. The decision is from May 2026, and how it plays out across the two states' courtrooms is still being written. A claim framed by someone tracking those decisions is worth more than one framed from a summary — including this one.

The freight paperwork that answers the broker question is easiest to obtain when someone asks for it early, and a claim built on both defendants from the start is stronger than one that adds the broker late.