Texas Supreme Court Pushes Back on Expanding Shipper Liability: What the Home Depot Decision Means for Brokers, Shippers, and Transportation Risk

In the span of two days in May 2026, two of the most consequential transportation-liability decisions in a generation came down — and on their face they look like they point in opposite directions.

On May 14, the United States Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, holding 9-0 that the FAAAA does not shield freight brokers from state-law negligent-hiring claims. The next morning, May 15, the Texas Supreme Court decided In re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., holding that a shipper whose goods were aboard a Werner truck owed no duty to a motorcyclist that Werner's driver killed.

Headlines treated the two as a contradiction: brokers exposed, shippers protected. That reading is wrong, and acting on it is dangerous. Read carefully, the decisions are not in tension at all. They are two halves of the same question — and that question is the one every broker, shipper, and risk manager should now be able to answer in writing.

What happened in the Home Depot case

The facts are tragic and ordinary, which is exactly why the case matters. Home Depot tendered a load of ordinary retail goods to Werner Enterprises, a nationwide, FMCSA-regulated motor carrier. While hauling that freight, a Werner driver ran a red light and fatally struck a motorcyclist, Natalio Garcia. Garcia's family sued.

They sued Werner, as you would expect. But they also sued Home Depot — not because Home Depot loaded the truck improperly, dispatched the driver, or had anything to do with the route, but because its cardboard boxes happened to be in the trailer. The procedural posture matters: Home Depot moved to dismiss under Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 91a, the state's early-dismissal mechanism for claims with no basis in law, and the case reached the Texas Supreme Court as a mandamus proceeding (hence In re Home Depot). The question was therefore purely legal: assuming everything the plaintiffs alleged is true, does a shipper owe a legal duty here at all?

Why the plaintiffs sued Home Depot

The plaintiffs' theory was negligent hiring and negligent entrustment aimed at the shipper. Specifically, they alleged Home Depot:

1. failed to screen Werner and its drivers before tendering freight;

2. willfully overlooked Werner's FMCSA and DOT violations;

3. disregarded Werner's safety record; and

4. failed to independently investigate the fitness of the particular driver hauling its goods.

It was not a frivolous-sounding pleading. The plaintiffs pointed out that Werner had logged roughly 850 reportable commercial-vehicle collisions in the two years before the crash. The argument, in essence: a company sophisticated enough to move freight nationally should have to look at the safety record of the carrier it hands its products to — and if it doesn't, and someone dies, it should answer for it.

The appeal of that argument is precisely what makes the Court's rejection of it instructive.

Why the Texas Supreme Court rejected the claim

Writing for the Court, Justice John Devine started from a bedrock principle of Texas tort law: "one who hires an independent contractor is generally not liable for the contractor's torts." A shipper that retains a licensed, independent motor carrier is, by default, in that posture.

The Court held that a "passive shipper" — one that hires a federally regulated, independent motor carrier and neither controls the carrier's operations nor creates risk through the loading or nature of the cargo — owes no legal duty to the motoring public for the carrier's driving conduct. In the Court's vivid framing, Home Depot's freight was "but a passenger: onboard but uninvolved in the accident."

The opinion's central sentence is the one worth committing to memory. The plaintiffs' liability theory, Justice Devine wrote, is

The Court also leaned on Werner's regulatory status: Werner was federally licensed, federally insured, and held a "satisfactory" FMCSA safety rating. The existence of a comprehensive federal safety regime — one that licenses, insures, and rates carriers — was part of why the Court declined to layer a freestanding state-law screening duty on top of every shipper.

Duty, control, conduct, and risk

The heart of the opinion is its framework for when a duty exists at all. Texas courts weigh several factors: the foreseeability of the risk, whether the defendant created or controlled the risk, and whether recognizing the asserted duty would be "practical or workable."

Applied to a passive shipper, each factor cut against a duty:

• Control. Home Depot did not direct Werner's hiring, dispatch, routing, hours, or driver supervision. Those are the carrier's decisions, governed by the carrier's federal obligations.
• Conduct. Home Depot did nothing to the load or the cargo that made the trip more dangerous. There was no improperly secured freight, no concealed hazmat, no oversize piece changing the truck's handling — the kinds of affirmative acts that can generate shipper liability.
• Risk. The risk that materialized — a driver running a red light — was the carrier's to manage. The shipper neither created it nor was positioned to control it.

The Court was careful to leave the door open where those factors line up differently. A shipper that loads a trailer negligently, ships a dangerous commodity without disclosure, or exercises genuine operational control over the carrier is in a different posture entirely. The holding is about the passive shipper, not a blanket immunity.

The fear of limitless liability

The Court's most candid passages are about consequences. If merely tendering ordinary freight to a licensed carrier created a duty to investigate that carrier, the Court reasoned, then virtually every company that ships anything — retailers, manufacturers, distributors, e-commerce sellers, the corner business mailing a pallet — would inherit a continuing obligation to investigate, monitor, and re-evaluate the safety performance of more than a million federally regulated motor carriers operating nationwide.

That, the Court concluded, would be unworkable, commercially disruptive, and inconsistent with the federal framework Congress built to license and police carriers. A duty that sweeping is exactly what the phrase "untethered from control, conduct, and risk" is meant to foreclose. The Court was not blessing indifference; it was refusing to convert the ordinary act of commerce into automatic tort exposure.

How this differs from Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II

Now place Montgomery next to it. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided one day earlier, a tractor-trailer rear-ended Shawn Montgomery's disabled vehicle on Interstate 70, costing him his leg. The truck was operated by Caribe Transport II; the load had been arranged by a freight broker, C.H. Robinson. Montgomery sued the broker for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier.

The legal fight was about FAAAA preemption — whether the federal statute that bars states from regulating a broker's "price, route, or service" wiped out the negligent-hiring claim. Writing for a unanimous Court (with a Kavanaugh concurrence joined by Alito), Justice Barrett held it did not. The claim fell within the Act's safety "safe harbor," which preserves state "safety regulatory authority … with respect to motor vehicles." As the Court put it:

Congress, the Court reasoned, sought economic deregulation — not safety deregulation — and would not have silently exempted brokers from the same tort duties that apply to the carriers they hire.

So the two cases differ on three axes:

• Different defendant. Montgomery is about a broker — an entity in the business of selecting carriers. Home Depot is about a shipper whose business is selling goods, not vetting fleets.
• Different legal question. Montgomery answered a preemption question (does federal law even allow the claim?). Home Depot answered a duty question (does state law impose an obligation here?).
• Different posture toward the carrier. A broker's core function is to interpose itself between shipper and carrier and exercise judgment about which carrier. A passive shipper exercises no such function.

Why people think the rulings conflict — and why they don't

The "conflict" narrative comes from collapsing those distinctions. Montgomery gets summarized as "you can be sued for hiring an unsafe carrier," and Home Depot as "you can't be sued for hiring an unsafe carrier," and the two slogans obviously clash.

But neither case actually says what the slogan says. Montgomery held only that the broker's claim is not preempted — it did not decide that C.H. Robinson was negligent, did not define the standard of care, and remanded for the merits. Home Depot held that a passive shipper with no control, no risk-creating conduct, and no operational role owes no duty — it did not immunize an actor who selects carriers as part of its job or who creates risk.

Put plainly: Montgomery says the courthouse door is open to negligent-selection claims; Home Depot says walking through that door still requires control, conduct, or risk. One is about whether the claim can be brought; the other is about whether the defendant did anything to owe a duty. They are answering different questions about different parties, and both answers can be — and are — correct at once.

An emerging standard: reasonable diligence, not automatic liability

Step back and a single principle emerges from both opinions. Neither court adopted strict liability, and neither court adopted immunity. Montgomery rejected the brokers' plea for a blanket federal shield. Home Depot rejected the plaintiffs' plea for blanket shipper exposure. What's left in the middle is a familiar negligence standard: ordinary, reasonable care, measured by what a reasonable actor in your role would have done with the information available at the time.

That is why the operative question after May 2026 is not "did a crash happen?" but:

For a broker, whose function is selecting carriers, "reasonable" means a real, repeatable vetting process. For a passive shipper, "reasonable" may mean very little — until the shipper takes on control, loads the trailer, or ships something that changes the risk, at which point the same diligence questions attach. The doctrinal logic of Montgomery does not stop at the broker; it follows control, conduct, and risk wherever they go.

What you should be able to produce if challenged years later

A crash is litigated years after the load moves. The discovery request is predictable: produce the file showing what you knew about this carrier when you tendered this load. The actors who lose these cases are rarely the ones who picked a bad carrier on one load; they're the ones who can't show what they checked. At minimum, you should be able to produce, for the specific load:

• Authority verification — operating status and authority active and properly classified at tender.
• Insurance verification — coverage confirmed in force, with limits adequate for the freight, on the date of the load.
• Safety-history review — the carrier's FMCSA safety rating and BASIC/SMS percentiles as they read at the time.
• Inspection and crash history — out-of-service rates and crash file reviewed, with the values captured.
• Screening documentation — a contemporaneous record of what was reviewed and the conclusion reached.
• Audit trail — who checked, what they saw, and when, time-stamped and preserved.
• A consistent procedure — evidence that this load was handled the same way every load is handled, not improvised after the fact.

Why Documentation Matters More Than Ever

Here is the practical pivot. After Montgomery, the negligent-selection claim against brokers is unmistakably live. After Home Depot, the dividing line is control, conduct, and risk — and proving where you fall on that line is an evidentiary problem.

A reasonable, documented screening process is the single best evidence that you exercised ordinary care. The categories are not exotic; they are the ones a plaintiff's lawyer will sequence through in discovery:

• Authority verification captured at tender, not reconstructed later.
• Insurance verification showing the policy was confirmed active, with adequate limits, on the load date.
• Safety-history review preserving the rating and scores as they appeared then — because a carrier's numbers change, and the only numbers that matter are the ones you could have seen.
• Inspection-history review documenting OOS performance and crash data at the time of selection.
• Screening documentation that records not just data but the conclusion a competent person drew from it.
• Audit trails that are append-only and time-stamped, so the file can't be quietly rewritten after a crash.
• Consistent carrier-selection procedures that show this wasn't a one-off — the strongest answer to "you only checked because you knew this carrier was dangerous."

The version of the record that exists the week after the crash persuades no one. The version captured the day of the tender is the whole ballgame.

The Real Question Is Not Whether a Crash Occurred

It is worth saying plainly, because both opinions imply it: courts do not expect brokers and shippers to prevent every accident. Home Depot expressly refused to make the mere occurrence of a crash a basis for liability "untethered from control, conduct, and risk." Montgomery preserved a negligence claim — fault measured by reasonable care — not a guarantee of safe outcomes.

What courts increasingly examine is what information was available at the time of selection, and what the defendant did with it. That reframes the entire risk posture. You are not being asked to predict which of a million carriers will run a red light next Tuesday. You are being asked whether, with the information reasonably available to you, you ran a reasonable process and acted on what it showed.

That distinction is liberating and demanding at once. Liberating, because perfection is not the standard and a bad outcome is not automatic liability. Demanding, because the ability to demonstrate a reasonable and documented screening process is now doing the work that hindsight used to do for plaintiffs. The defensible position is not "we couldn't have known." It is "here is exactly what we knew, here is what we checked, and here is why our decision was reasonable on the information we had."

Where the industry is heading

Taken together, Montgomery and In re Home Depot mark the maturing of transportation liability into something more coherent than the headlines suggest. The era of arguing over blanket shields and blanket exposure is closing. What's emerging is an expectation of documented diligence — proportioned to your role, anchored to the moment of selection, and provable years later.

That expectation rewards the same discipline whether you're a broker selecting carriers, a shipper that exercises real control, a risk manager building defensible procedures, or an insurer underwriting the difference between a vetting program and a vibe. The actors who thrive will treat carrier-selection records the way regulated industries treat any other compliance artifact: captured contemporaneously, preserved immutably, and retrievable on demand.

The crash is not the question the court will ask you about. The question is what you knew, what you did, and whether you can prove it. In a world where that file may be requested years after the load moved, the systems that quietly preserve carrier-screening records stop being administrative overhead and become the most valuable thing in the litigation file.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

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Sources

• In re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., No. 25-0317 (Tex. May 15, 2026) — opinion (PDF)
• In re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. — Justia (Supreme Court of Texas, 2026)
• Texas Supreme Court Rejects Expansive "Passive Shipper" Liability — Clausen Miller
• In re Home Depot: Texas Supreme Court reshapes shipper liability — Kennedys
• Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238 (U.S. May 14, 2026) — opinion (PDF)
• Supreme Court Holds Freight Broker Liable for Negligent Hiring — Ogletree Deakins
• Court rules freight brokers can face negligent hiring suits under state law — SCOTUSblog
• Bad Match, Big Consequences: Supreme Court Holds Freight Brokers Accountable for Negligent Carrier Selection — Crowell & Moring