Nine justices killed the preemption defense in May. A Dallas jury returned a verdict of $604 million in July. CHRW beat earnings anyway. None of that settles the liability math while countless others play on in courtrooms across the nation. 

Caribe Transport II held a conditional safety rating when C.H. Robinson tendered it a load of plastic pots. That rating wasn’t a secret. It sat on a public federal website, next to the driver qualification, hours-of-service, maintenance, and crash-rate deficiencies that produced it, and it took about ninety seconds to pull up. Shawn Montgomery was stopped on the shoulder of Interstate 70 in Illinois with a mechanical problem on December 7, 2017, when Caribe’s truck rear-ended him. He lost his leg. More than eight years later, nine justices told the freight industry that the question of whether pulling that record was worth ninety seconds belongs to a jury, and every argument brokers had been making about federal preemption ended that morning.

The case is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, argued March 4, 2026, decided May 14, 2026. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a unanimous Court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito. The vote was 9-0. The Court held that a negligent-hiring claim against a freight broker is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, because the FAAAA’s safety exception at 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(2)(A) preserves state authority to regulate safety with respect to motor vehicles, and requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in picking a carrier directly concerns the trucks that will be on the road. The Court sent the case back for further proceedings. That is not news by itself. What matters is what the industry built on top of the preemption argument, and how quickly a Dallas jury dismantled it.

For roughly a decade, federal courts were divided on whether the FAAAA blocked state negligent-hiring claims against brokers. The Sixth and Ninth Circuits had let those claims proceed. The Seventh and Eleventh Circuits had consistently killed them at the pleading stage, before a plaintiff ever reached discovery. C.H. Robinson’s district court dismissed the Montgomery case on Seventh Circuit preemption grounds, and the circuit affirmed that dismissal in 2025. The Supreme Court took the case to resolve the split. It did, and it did not split the difference. The defense is gone in every circuit as of May 14.

Kavanaugh’s concurrence, joined by Alito, tried to keep the door from swinging wide open. The Court’s decision, Kavanaugh wrote, “should not be read to mean that brokers will routinely be subject to state tort liability in the wake of truck accidents.” Brokers that acted responsibly can still defend themselves. C.H. Robinson leaned on that language in its press response the same day. The company said it was disappointed, reaffirmed its commitment to safety, and announced it would support stricter federal enforcement, including passage of Dalilah’s Law. What it didn’t say, and couldn’t say, was what responsible vetting now looks like to a Texas jury. Seventy days later, it found out.

On July 23, 2026, a jury in Dallas County returned a $604 million advisory verdict in Lipe v. Lupus Superior, LLC. The case comes from a March 2021 crash on Interstate 20 in Mississippi. A Lupus Superior tractor-trailer ran into stopped traffic and set off a six-vehicle pileup that caught fire. Jennifer Lipe, Benjamin Brewer, and Rhoderick Coleman died in their vehicles. Rodney Hawkins and Gabrielle Broussard were injured. All three of the people who died left children behind. The jury found all three defendants negligent and apportioned 23% of the financial responsibility to C.H. Robinson, roughly $139 million. The company may be held jointly and severally liable for the full $604 million. Arnold & Itkin represented the plaintiffs.

The facts the plaintiffs put in front of that jury are worth sitting with before you get to the liability question. According to the Commercial Carrier Journal, federal regulators had flagged Lupus Superior for unsafe driving alerts for more than a year before the fatal crash. The night of the incident, the driver notified both Lupus Superior and C.H. Robinson that he was too sick to continue driving. Plaintiffs contended that rather than rescheduling the load, Robinson permitted him to stay on the road. C.H. Robinson disputes this characterization. Its Chief Legal Officer, Dorothy Capers, said in a release that the carrier held a Satisfactory FMCSA rating when Robinson selected it, had safely delivered nearly 270 loads for the company, and that the Satisfactory rating remained in place after a federal review of the accident. CEO Dave Bozeman told investors on the Q2 2026 earnings call that C.H. Robinson did not act negligently and would immediately appeal if the verdict is entered as final. That story is C.H. Robinson’s to make. A jury heard it and returned $604 million.

The verdict is advisory. The court hasn’t finalized it. Under Texas procedure, the judge is not bound by an advisory jury’s damages number, and the case will go through post-trial proceedings before any final judgment is entered. Robinson disclosed the verdict in an 8-K and recorded only an immaterial accrual. That second fact is the one the market needed to hear. According to Robinson’s 10-Q, the company carries $155 million of liability and excess insurance per occurrence, with a $5 million deductible. The jury’s several share on Robinson is $139 million. If the verdict survives post-trial and appeal at anything near that number, the company’s insurance covers most of the broker’s portion. That is not a guarantee. Joint and several liability means a court could require Robinson to fund the gap left by an insolvent co-defendant. The true economic exposure won’t be clear until appeal, and the appeal won’t be fast.

Here’s what the earnings beat doesn’t change. Montgomery didn’t create a new duty. It removed a procedural escape hatch. State law has always required ordinary care in selecting a carrier, in some form. The FAAAA preemption defense ended those cases before discovery, before a jury heard the carrier’s safety record, and before anyone asked whether a broker checked FMCSA’s public data before tendering a load. That procedural door is now closed. Cases that settled cheaply before, because the preemption motion was a near-certain win, now go to discovery. Discovery produces documents. Documents go to juries. Juries in Mississippi-originating crash cases that move to Texas produce verdicts like Lipe. The liability math going forward isn’t the $604 million number. It’s the cost of the discovery process multiplied across every case that no longer gets killed early, plus whatever the insurance market decides that pipeline is worth at renewal time.

C.H. Robinson responded to Montgomery by tightening its carrier standards, including cutting off carriers with a conditional safety rating. That move is real, and it’s worth naming. Not every broker in America has the scale to absorb the vetting cost that standard implies, and the Transportation Intermediaries Association noted at the time that smaller carriers may find themselves vetted out of the market on liability risk alone, regardless of their actual safety record. The counterintuitive result of a ruling designed to protect highway safety is that the smallest operators, the ones running two or three trucks, lose access to the spot market first. The large carriers with the resources to maintain a satisfactory rating and a paper trail of compliant loads survive. That restructuring is already underway.

The earnings picture is real. Q2 2026 revenue hit $4.93 billion, up 19.3% year-over-year. Adjusted EPS came in at $1.61 against a consensus estimate of $1.52, the fourth consecutive quarter C.H. Robinson beat EPS expectations. Adjusted operating income grew 20% year-over-year. The company hit mid-cycle operating margin targets in both its North American Surface Transportation and Global Forwarding segments, even as the Cass Freight Shipment Index posted its fifteenth consecutive quarterly decline. Average headcount was down 10.8% year over year while volume grew, which is the AI and Lean productivity story the company has been telling since late 2022. Those numbers are credible, and they’re the reason the stock bounced. Robinson’s 52-week high was $210.33, hit on July 22, the day before the Lipe verdict came down. The stock dropped to a floor near $141.63 after the disclosure. As of September 9, 2026, it’s trading near $150, with Citi having upgraded it to Buy from Neutral.

The market’s read is that the legal exposure is manageable. The insurance structure backs that in the near term. What the market can’t price yet is the 2027 insurance renewal cycle, where underwriters will have the Lipe verdict, the Montgomery decision, and whatever the discovery pipeline on open cases looks like, and they’ll price it. That’s the real liability reckoning, and it runs on a schedule that doesn’t match the earnings calendar. For now, Robinson’s operational transformation is strong enough to carry the stock. Whether it’s strong enough to carry the insurance tab being written right now is the question that won’t be answered until next year.