As the two sides in the RICO case against brokerage giants C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) and TQL begin to make their case in legal filings, a sobering reality about the litigation is that jury selection is not likely for a mere 17 months.
Last week brought a flurry of submissions in the case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern district of Texas by a group of carriers alleging damages at the hands of the two 3PLs’ practices.
One of those documents laid out proposed dates in the case. While they have not been finalized, with a scheduling conference set for November 23, the tentative date for jury selection before Judge Rodney Gilstrap is April 3, 2028.
That is the final date suggested in a process that does have a few late 2027 dates proposed for the discovery process. A late January 2028 date is proposed for the completion of a mediation process.
Several key documents including proposed jury instructions need to be filed by March 13, 2028 and there will be a pretrial conference before Judge Gilstrap on March 20 of that year.
There’s a wide range of developments that could occur before then; the most pressing legal issue is TQL’s request for a dismissal on the grounds that the lawsuit shouldn’t be in federal court.
You’ll have to wait
But the schedule is a reminder that anybody in the brokerage industry waiting for some broad impact or precedent from the case of Stevens Trucking et. al. vs. C.H. Robinson et al–the latter including TQL–has a long road ahead.
The carriers that filed the suit–Stevens Trucking, Western Flyer Express, D&M Carriers dba Freymiller Trucking, Christenson Transportation, E.O.S. Inc. and IWX Motor Freight–fired back last week against the TQL dismissal request. The legal provision TQL is basing its request on is that the suit was improperly filed in the wrong court under the legal doctrine of Forum Non Conveniens (FNC).
TQL’s argument is that all of the carriers in the suit, except IWX, had signed carrier-service contracts with the 3PL, requiring them to litigate any dispute in a state court in Clermont, Ohio, near TQL’s headquarters city of Cincinnati.
C.H. Robinson has not filed any documents in the case. A spokeswoman for C.H. Robinson said it is not connected to TQL’s FNC filing.
What is ‘forced labor’?
The carriers’ lawsuit charges TQL and C.H. Robinson engaged in “forced labor.” While the original suit does not have an explicit definition of “forced labor,” at one point it comes close when it says that TQL and C.H. Robinson “choose foreign labor due to the ease in exploitation, lack of oversight and understanding, and the ability through various means to keep foreign labor in peonage and forced labor conditions.”
The carriers’ response to the TQL FNC request is legalistic, focusing on the issue of the proper forum for the lawsuit and why it believes the Texas federal court, and not the Ohio court, is the proper place to battle it out with the two companies.
The clause in the carrier-service contracts driving litigation to Clermont, according to the carriers, only works if “the court (interprets) these clauses to go far beyond the agreement, and stretch all the way to infinity, encompassing literally ‘any dispute’ that could ever arise between these parties, including those that have no relationship whatsoever to the contract.”
The heavy activity last week also included a filing by the carriers called an “omnibus” response.
That summary omnibus filing gave the carriers an opportunity to recap many of the charges it made in its original filing, which was submitted to the court September 23.
The core of their argument is that the two brokers used their power as large 3PLs to undercut the rates being charged by the carriers. And they did this, according to the omnibus filing, “through the use of Illegal Carriers and forced labor.” The lawsuit cites an array of agreements or anticipated agreements the various carriers had with certain shippers that they allege were lost to the 3PLs because of the brokers’ practices.
“TQL’s pattern of activity has precluded the Plaintiffs from participating meaningfully on bids for the customers and shippers,” the omnibus filing says, making similar allegations against C.H. Robinson.
Omnibus sums it up
The omnibus document gives the carriers the opportunity to repeat a claim made in the original filing: that TQL and C.H. Robinson were key drivers of the narrative that there was a “truck driver shortage.”
“Defendants relied on an age-old marketing campaign to exploit (the) opportunity: create the need, sell to the need,” the omnibus document says.
ATA finds itself cited in suit
With the departure of Chris Spears as head of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), it isn’t clear that the organization will continue to hold that there is a driver shortage. But regardless, ATA has gotten dragged into the suit, not as a defendant but as a target for the carriers’ accusations.
“There was no actual driver shortage,” the omnibus brief says. “Defendants did not want to pay willing drivers a living wage. Defendants promoted the narrative of a ‘truck driver shortage’ through marketing materials and their trade group, the ATA.”
The suit accuses C.H. Robinson of boosting immigration to “alleviate” any shortage, and that the ATA “lobbied the Department of Transportation in 2021 to loosen licensing and
immigration regulations.”
The ATA, in response to a query from FreightWaves, issued this statement from its chief advocacy & public affairs officer Henry Hanscom: “ATA is not a party to this lawsuit, and neither C.H. Robinson nor TQL is a member of ATA. The claims in the lawsuit about our association are false.”
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