What the Supreme Court's Truck Accident Ruling Means for Kentucky

A Broker Can Now Answer for an Unsafe Carrier

By Sam Aguiar · Reviewed July 17, 2026

By Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers · Last Updated July 14, 2026

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that federal law no longer shields freight brokers from state negligent hiring claims when those claims concern motor vehicle safety. The broker that put an unsafe trucking company on the road can now answer for that choice in state court, alongside the carrier and the driver. For Kentucky truck crash victims, this changes who can be held accountable and how much coverage is actually within reach.

What Did the Supreme Court Decide?

On May 14, 2026, the United States Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC. The vote was 9 to 0. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion.

The ruling holds that federal law no longer shields freight brokers from state negligent hiring claims when those claims concern motor vehicle safety. In plain terms, the broker that put an unsafe trucking company on the road can now answer for that choice in state court, alongside the carrier and the driver.

The case turned on the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, a 1994 law known as the FAAAA. Congress extended its preemption to brokers by a 1995 amendment. That law generally blocks states from regulating broker services. It has one carve-out: states keep their authority over motor vehicle safety. The Court held that a negligent hiring claim about a broker’s choice of an unsafe carrier falls inside that carve-out under 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(2)(A). Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Alito, wrote separately. He called it a close case, but agreed that truck safety is a count of life and death and that liability gives brokers a strong incentive to do business only with safe and reliable carriers. He also noted that brokers who act reasonably and hire reputable carriers should be able to defend these suits.

A Crash on an Illinois Highway

Shawn Montgomery’s tractor-trailer was stopped on the side of an Illinois highway when a truck hauling a load for Caribe Transport II, LLC veered off course and struck it. Montgomery’s leg had to be amputated, and he sustained other severe and permanent injuries. The shipment had been brokered by C.H. Robinson Worldwide, one of the largest freight brokers in the country.

Montgomery sued C.H. Robinson for negligent hiring. Caribe Transport had a conditional safety rating from the FMCSA when the broker hired it, and Montgomery alleged C.H. Robinson knew, or should have known, that choosing the carrier was reasonably likely to result in crashes that would injure others. The district court dismissed the claim as preempted by federal law. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed and sent the case back.

What Does a Freight Broker Do?

Most freight in this country moves through a middleman. A company has a load to ship. A broker finds a trucking company to haul it and takes a fee for making the match. The biggest brokers arrange millions of shipments a year.

The broker picks the carrier. That choice is the whole case.

More than 780,000 motor carriers operate in the United States, and roughly 28,000 brokers arrange transportation for about a third of all freight. Those figures come from FMCSA data cited in the Montgomery opinion itself. Roadside inspection data shows roughly one in five commercial vehicles checked is placed out of service. The safety records are public. The FMCSA’s SAFER system, BASIC percentile scores, crash rates, and out of service histories are free and updated in real time. A broker can check them before every single dispatch.

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Brokers Escaped These Claims for Decades

For decades, brokers argued the FAAAA preempted negligent hiring claims, and in much of the country courts agreed. The Seventh Circuit’s 2023 decision in Ye v. GlobalTranz and the Eleventh Circuit’s Aspen American v. Landstar Ranger shut these claims down before discovery even began. The Sixth and Ninth Circuits went the other way and allowed them. That split is what the Supreme Court agreed to resolve.

The shield mattered because the broker is often the party with the deepest knowledge of the carrier’s safety record. It saw the data before the truck ever left the lot. In the circuits that followed Ye, brokers were functionally untouchable. Montgomery ends the split nationwide, in favor of the injured person.

An Insurance Gap This Ruling Closes

The federal minimum insurance for an interstate motor carrier is $750,000. The FMCSA puts the comprehensive cost of the average fatal large truck crash at more than $15 million in 2023 dollars.

That gap has been the defining problem in trucking litigation. Families dealing with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord damage, amputations, or wrongful death have routinely walked away with a fraction of their actual damages because the only reachable defendant was an undercapitalized carrier with minimum coverage. Kentucky drivers know this problem well. The state’s own minimum insurance limits have not moved since 1974.

Montgomery changes the equation. The freight broker is often a large, well-capitalized company. When its carrier selection was negligent, it is now a viable defendant.

What Counts as Negligent Broker Selection?

The question in every brokered-freight case now becomes simple: what did the broker know, and what did it check? Red flags that put a broker’s decision in front of a jury include:

• A conditional safety rating from the FMCSA
• Recent out of service orders
• Operating authority less than eighteen months old
• Elevated BASIC scores or a documented crash pattern

All of it is discoverable. Attorneys can obtain the broker’s vetting policies, screening criteria, pre-dispatch communications, and the historical pattern of carriers the broker repeatedly hired. The absence of a documented vetting process is itself evidence.

What This Means for Kentucky Truck Crash Victims

Kentucky will feel this ruling more than almost any state. Four major interstate freight corridors cross the Commonwealth: I-65, I-64, I-71, and I-75. Three of them converge in Louisville, making Jefferson County one of the highest volume commercial truck corridors in the Southeast. I-75 runs through Lexington and the eastern part of the state.

The crash numbers follow the freight. Kentucky State Police data shows trucks were involved in 9,736 collisions in 2024 alone. Ninety-nine of those crashes were fatal, accounting for about 15% of all fatal collisions statewide that year. Nationally, about 7 in 10 people killed in large-truck crashes are occupants of the other vehicle, not the truck. Nationally, FMCSA data cited in the Montgomery opinion shows about 500,000 reported truck crashes in 2022, causing roughly 5,000 deaths and 114,000 injuries.

A meaningful share of the freight on Kentucky highways is brokered. After Montgomery, that means many Kentucky truck accident cases now have three potential defendants instead of two: the driver, the carrier, and the broker that chose the carrier. Each one brings its own insurance coverage, its own records, and its own duty to explain what it did.

How This Changes the Way We Build Trucking Cases

Trucking cases at our firm start the same way every time. We refuse to accept the trucking company’s version of events as the starting point. Every serious case begins with an independent reconstruction, and on major cases we routinely retain outside professionals: reconstructionists, engineers, medical reviewers, and life care planners. We fund that work from day one.

Speed counts most. We send formal spoliation letters early to preserve electronic logging device data, black box data, dashcam footage, driver qualification files, and maintenance records. Montgomery adds a new page to that letter: the broker’s carrier selection records, the FMCSA safety data the broker had at the time of dispatch, and the broker’s documented vetting process.

The ruling also changes the leverage in a case. A broker that dispatched a carrier with a conditional rating now has to explain that decision under oath. That kind of discovery creates pressure, and pressure moves cases. We also hold statewide archived access to Kentucky DOT and TRIMARC traffic camera footage with a six month window, which lets us pull objective video of crash sequences on I-65, I-64, I-71, and I-75 that other firms cannot reach.

No ruling guarantees an outcome. What Montgomery does is open a door that was closed for thirty years: more reachable defendants, more discovery, and more available coverage in the cases where a broker’s choice put an unsafe truck on a Kentucky highway. We have covered how corporate safety failures get exposed before, in our report from the NTSB hearings on the UPS Flight 2976 crash. The pattern is the same: the records tell the story, if you move fast enough to get them.

A Trucking Team Recognized Nationwide

Trucking cases are a dedicated practice at Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers, with their own team and their own track record.

Sam Aguiar was named a Forbes 2025 Best-In-State Top Lawyer, one of only two personal injury attorneys recognized in Kentucky and one of sixteen nationwide. He has earned Super Lawyers recognition every year from 2017 through 2026, along with the National Trial Lawyers Top 100, the Trucking Trial Lawyers Association Top 10, and the Courier Journal’s Community Choice selection as Louisville’s top personal injury lawyer.

Jon Hollan leads the trucking practice at Sam Aguiar Injury Lawyers and at H&A Law, the firm’s Lexington-based trucking litigation firm. In 2019, he became one of the youngest attorneys in Kentucky history to secure a seven figure jury verdict. He is an NTL Top 10 Trucking Lawyer, and attorneys across the country bring him their Amazon and FedEx Ground delivery cases. Kentucky families know him from WKYT’s Truck Talk.

Both attorneys were named to The NTL Trucking Top 10 for 2026, and the team has obtained more than a dozen multi million dollar commercial vehicle recoveries, with results reaching as high as $6.7 million. You can review our case results here.

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