Nunez v. Total Quality Logistics, filed August 12 in the Eastern District of Texas, is the kind of case that didn’t survive past a motion to dismiss three months ago. Montgomery changed that.

On August 12, 2026, a plaintiff named Nunez filed a motor vehicle suit against Total Quality Logistics, LLC in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, docket number 6:26-cv-00387. The complaint names TQL as the defendant, not the carrier, not the driver. TQL is the broker. Three months ago, that distinction would have been the end of the case. It isn’t anymore.

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), and the preemption wall that the freight brokerage industry had been standing behind for the better part of a decade came down. Justice Barrett wrote for a unanimous nine-justice court. The holding is narrow in its language and enormous in its reach: a state-law negligent hiring claim against a freight broker, where that claim relates to the selection of a motor carrier, is not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 because it falls within the FAAAA’s safety exception at 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(2)(A). That exception preserves a state’s safety regulatory authority over motor vehicles. Barrett concluded that requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier directly concerns the motor vehicles that will be on the road as a result of that selection. You pick the truck. You own the consequences of the pick.

The case that produced the ruling started on an Illinois highway. Shawn Montgomery had pulled his tractor-trailer onto the shoulder when a truck operated by Yosniel Varela-Mojena, driving for Caribe Transport II, veered off the road and struck him. Montgomery lost his leg. He sued the driver, the carrier, and the freight broker that had arranged the shipment, C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. His theory against Robinson was straightforward: Caribe Transport held a conditional safety rating at the time of the dispatch, with documented FMCSA deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rate. Robinson knew, or should have known, that. The district court dismissed the negligent-hiring claim as preempted under the FAAAA. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed.

To understand why that reversal mattered, you need the history of the split it resolved. Congress enacted the FAAAA in 1994 to deregulate freight by blocking states from passing laws that effectively set prices, routes, or services for motor carriers and brokers. Congress carved out one exception: states kept their safety regulatory authority over motor vehicles. For twenty years, the question of whether that exception covered tort claims against brokers for picking a bad carrier was genuinely open. The Ninth and Sixth Circuits said yes. The Seventh and Eleventh Circuits said no. Brokers in Seventh and Eleventh Circuit states, a category that includes Illinois, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, moved to dismiss negligent-selection claims at the pleadings stage and almost always won. Plaintiffs in those states had no path to a jury on broker liability. The industry called this outcome federal preemption. Plaintiffs’ lawyers called it a wall. Both were right. Montgomery knocked it down.

The Sixth Circuit had already ruled against TQL specifically on this question. In Cox v. Total Quality Logistics, Inc., 142 F.4th 847 (6th Cir. 2025), the court held that a negligent-selection claim falls within the safety exception because such claims are inherently tied to the operation of motor vehicles on public highways. The plaintiff in Cox had alleged that TQL disregarded publicly available FMCSA safety data before booking the carrier whose truck killed her spouse. TQL took that loss to the Supreme Court, No. 25-145. On May 26, 2026, twelve days after Montgomery came down, the Court denied certiorari, leaving the Sixth Circuit’s ruling against TQL intact and confirming that Montgomery‘s holding applies in every circuit. The question of whether broker negligent-selection claims are available under state law is closed. They are.

TQL is not a small player in this conversation. The company is the second-largest freight broker in North America, founded in Cincinnati in 1997, with more than 9,000 employees across 65 offices and a carrier network that Forbes puts above 110,000 active carriers. Revenue in 2023 was $6.7 billion according to public figures. The company moved more than four million shipments in 2024. That volume is also TQL’s exposure: under Montgomery, every load tendered to a carrier is a selection decision that can now be tested in front of a jury if something goes wrong. TQL’s own certiorari petition in Cox predicted that the cost of that exposure would cascade through the economy. Justice Kavanaugh said something similar in his concurrence in Montgomery, joined by Justice Alito, cautioning that litigation costs will cascade through the economy to consumers. The prediction and the concurrence arrived at the same place. Neither stopped the outcome.

The Eastern District of Texas is worth noting as a venue. It’s a plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction with a history of large verdicts in commercial trucking cases. Filing there is not accidental. TQL opened a Fort Worth, Texas office in January 2025, deepening its Texas footprint. The new case, 6:26-cv-00387, is a motor vehicle matter under Justia’s classification, which is the standard category for personal injury and wrongful death claims arising from crashes. The complaint’s underlying facts, the specific carrier involved, the date and location of any crash, and the nature of Nunez’s injuries are not yet in the public record. No RECAP documents have been filed on the CourtListener docket as of publication.

The record does establish the legal posture TQL now faces. The preemption defense that would have ended this case before discovery is gone. TQL must now show, on the merits, that its carrier-selection process for this load met the standard of ordinary care. That means producing its vetting file: the carrier’s FMCSA safety rating as of the date of tender, the inspection history it pulled or didn’t pull, its internal criteria for what made the carrier acceptable, and the specific rep or algorithm that approved the dispatch. Approximately 90 percent of all motor carriers don’t carry a formal FMCSA safety rating, according to Hinshaw & Culbertson’s post-Montgomery analysis, which means most selections can’t be defended with a single number. The jury decides what reasonable diligence looks like. That is exactly what brokers spent a decade trying to prevent.

If you’re a broker and you don’t have a written carrier-selection program with documented criteria, dated audit records, and a file that shows what you checked on this specific carrier for this specific load, you’re litigating without a defense. Not a weak defense. No defense. The standard is ordinary care in the selection. The proof of ordinary care is the record you made at the time. A carrier approval that lives only in a rep’s memory, or in a checkbox in a TMS that nobody can explain, isn’t a record. It’s an absence of one, and a plaintiff’s lawyer will say so. The document that proves you were reasonable has to exist before the crash, not after you get served.

The record in 6:26-cv-00387 does not establish what carrier TQL selected, whether that carrier had red flags in its FMCSA profile, or what TQL’s vetting file contains. Those questions belong to discovery. What it establishes is that a plaintiff has sued the broker, the broker can no longer end the case on preemption grounds, and that set of facts is now the floor in every circuit in the country.