C.H. Robinson a defendant in post-Montgomery Florida broker liability case

A deadly U-turn

Singh attempted to make a U-turn across several lanes of Florida’s Turnpike. He was seeking to make the turn into what the lawsuit calls a “crossover slot” that is designed to handle turns for official vehicles, not a full tractor-trailer combination. 

“For a commercial motor vehicle such as the truck operated by Singh, attempting a U-turn through this emergency crossover is expressly forbidden by law and the posted signage,” the lawsuit says. 

As Singh made the turn from the outside shoulder, it created “an unavoidable barrier for approaching northbound traffic,” the lawsuit said.

That traffic included a minivan with a driver and two passengers, including Joseph. The resulting crash with Singh’s truck saw the minivan end up under the trailer, and all three people in the vehicle were killed.

Singh was in the U.S. illegally at the time of the crash. He is being held without bond.  

A political hot potato

The horrific nature of the crash, along with Singh’s immigration status and the fact that his CDL had been granted by California, has put the fatal wreck at the heart of political battles beyond the accident itself. 

The lawsuit comes just weeks after the Montgomery decision before the Supreme Court. That unanimous SCOTUS decision settled conflicting precedents in several circuit courts regarding broker liability under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (F4A), holding that the so-called safety exception that allowed a state legal action against a transportation company could be used to take action against a broker who hired a carrier involved in a crash. Some interpretations of F4A on the circuit court had said such action was preempted.

C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) was the broker that hired Caribe Transport II. A truck from that company struck driver Shawn Montgomery, who was tending to his own truck on the side of an Illinois road, and he lost a leg as a result. 

A lower court, affirmed by the Seventh Circuit, said the safety exception had preempted legal action against C.H. Robinson. But the Montgomery decision has ended that defense for the entire brokerage community in all jurisdictions.

While Singh and White Hawk are defendants, this case will be of interest because it is one of the first to target a freight broker in the post-Montgomery world. And not just any broker: the biggest, and the one that led the unsuccessful fight before the Supreme Court in the Montgomery case to keep the 3PL industry from being sucked into the safety exception.

Defining a broker’s responsibility

C.H. Robinson “owed a duty to exercise reasonable care in the selection and retention of the motor carrier it hired to transport the subject shipment, including a duty to select or retain a motor carrier that it knew or should have known was unfit, unsafe, unqualified or otherwise reasonably likely to cause harm to the motoring public,” the lawsuit alleges.

And in a passage that sums up the entire issue now facing 3PLs in a post-Montgomery world, the lawsuit says “the exercise of reasonable care in selecting a motor carrier, under both C.H. Robinson’s own represented standards and the custom and practice of the brokerage industry, required C.H. Robinson to review a carrier’s publicly available safety record and qualifications before entrusting it with a shipment.”

One of the pillars of the 3PL’s legal arguments, not just in Montgomery but in lower court federal actions where it prevailed, was that a carrier registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) not under any sort of negative classification that would suggest it shouldn’t be booked by a broker relieved the 3PL of legal liability. 

What will be the new set of legal precedents under that question of responsibility–a key FMCSA official, Jesse Elison, said recently at a FreightWaves forum, “we aren’t a ratings agency”–is enough of an issue that the Transportation Intermediaries Association recently asked FMCSA for a rulemaking process to help clarify the issue.

That wasn’t our guy

While there are questions surrounding legal liability in a post-Montgomery freight market, C.H. Robinson’s first line of defense appears to be that it had nothing to do with White Hawk, the carrier involved in the crash.

In a prepared statement, Dorothy Capers, C.H. Robinson’s chief legal officer, said White Hawk “is not an approved carrier for C.H. Robinson nor has been authorized in our system for years.”

Capers said White Hawk’s last recorded use by C.H. Robinson, according to the company’s records “last moved a shipment for C.H. Robinson on Jan. 29, 2024, and they were not active or authorized at the time of the Aug. 12, 2025, incident in question.”

“We also have no record of this shipment being brokered by C.H. Robinson,” she added.

FMCSA’s SAFER information on White Hawk is that is active but “not authorized.”

Capers said that “our deepest sympathies go out to all the families affected by roadway tragedies. Safety matters deeply to us and is foundational to how we operate and the decisions we make every day.”

Meanwhile, the original case of Montgomery vs. Caribe Transport II on Monday received its formal judgment from the Supreme Court. Attorneys will need to file their next briefs in the case to the Seventh Circuit by July 6. 

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