In May, the U.S. Supreme Court reached a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. This decision made life more difficult for freight brokers. Freight brokers are middlemen who book transportation carriers on behalf of shipper clients.
The Montgomery ruling removes a decades-old dodge employed by brokers. Brokers are now legally liable in state courts for negligent carrier selection. Shawn Montgomery sustained severe and permanent injuries after his tractor-trailer was struck by a truck driven by a motor carrier hired by the large freight brokerage C.H. Robinson Worldwide. Montgomery claimed that C.H. Robinson should have known from the carrier’s safety rating that hiring it to transport goods was reasonably likely to result in crashes that would injure others. The Supreme Court agreed.
The ruling establishes that brokers have a duty of reasonable care when selecting carriers and can be held liable in court for failing to conduct due diligence into the safety and compliance history of the carriers they hire. Brokers now must conduct a freight-industry-specific background check. Accident records and inspection records are public information – readily available to freight brokers. Ignorance is no longer a defense. Brokers must now treat carrier vetting as a core operational and legal responsibility, with strong documentation and consistent safety standards to mitigate risk. There are a variety of technologies that can be useful in proving due diligence.
One key technology is camera safety systems. If a trucking firm has that kind of system in place and uses it to improve driver performance, both the carrier and the broker win. However, due to industry dynamics, this is unlikely to be widely deployed in the industry.
Bennett’s Camera Safety System Provides Litigation Protection
The Bennett Family of Companies is a logistics provider that has prioritized this technology. Bennett has 14 business units that provide a wide variety of transportation services. Bennett controls 4,000 vehicles and generates nearly $1 B in revenue.
Bennett has a hybrid brokerage/carrier model. 85-90% of the fleet consists of owner-operators. An owner-operator is an independent truck driver who owns and operates their own trucking business. But Bennett’s owner-operator partners lease their equipment to the company and run under Bennet’s Department of Transportation authority. This means that they cannot carry loads for anyone else. So, in terms of the legal environment, Bennett would be considered a broker. But many shippers view Bennett as a carrier because they control these assets.
For small trucking firms, margins are tight. The owner-operators who choose to work for Bennett presumably get better margins and more loads. Bennett also sweetens the pot by paying insurance that covers the first $200,000 in damages in the event of an accident.
Bennett Uses a Camera Safety System from Motive
Praveen Boppana, the CIO, explained the Motive system to me. The cameras are forward-facing. These cameras record driving behavior, near accidents, and accidents. The ROI would have been even better if driver-facing cameras had also been employed. These cameras detect distracted driving. “Owner-operators did not want cameras facing them.” To get owner-operators to accept forward-facing cameras was already “a huge deal.”
Motive’s ELD sensors can detect a wide variety of events: hard stopping, precipitous acceleration, speeding, sudden lane changes, and so forth. But in isolation, sensor data can be misleading. A sudden lane change combined with a hard stop can be a sign of great driving if it allows a driver to avoid an accident. The camera data helps tell the full story.
Motive provides driver safety scores. 80 to 100 is a good score. 50 to 80 shows a moderate risk. And then below 50 is a score indicating a driver at high risk. The safety department tracks the scores. It is worth pointing out that a good driver can experience something in their life that makes them less safety-conscious. Poor drivers, with coaching and a more positive attitude, can become highly rated drivers. Chris Baker, the operations risk manager at Bennett, explained that with the safety system, they can ID drivers more likely to be in accidents over the next couple of months due to driving behaviors and then mitigate these behaviors before they cause an accident.
Scores and incidents trigger workflows. A score that is too low or a severe incident can result in a driver being assigned to a coaching program. Other incidents trigger immediate person-to-person coaching.
But there is also ongoing AI coaching. Here, the system gives ongoing verbal feedback while the driver is driving. The system might, for example, politely tell a driver that they are tailgating. “AI coaching is really important,” Mr. Boppana exclaimed. “It is not easy to touch 4,500 drivers. A lot of these low critical events, the AI coaching can take care of.”
Jared Whitson, the director of safety at Bennett, explained that critical alerts are automatically sent to the relevant business unit. This allows them to immediately reach out to their driver and the other party involved. When an accident occurs, they go to the platform and download the video. “We’ve had instances where the driver on the scene was about to get a ticket for causing an accident. The video was shown to the officer, and then the officer changed the ticket. Ten years ago, those accidents would have been blamed on the professional truck driver.”
The videos are backed up, so even if the truck loses power, they are protected.
Reasonable Care Requires Appropriate Processes, Not Just Technology
A camera system, by itself, is not a magic bullet. It has to be integrated into a comprehensive safety program. At Bennett, there are monthly safety meetings. These monthly meetings are now much more focused and specific, which in turn is having a company-wide effect on CSA Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) scores, Whitson pointed out. “We’re seeing our compliance numbers internally improve drastically. We’re also seeing the CSA Basic and hours of service improve.”
In short, camera systems, when accompanied by appropriate processes, are powerful evidence that a company has a safety culture and is exercising due diligence in selecting a carrier.
However, even before this decision, this was a proven solution. Bennett implemented the fleet safety system from Motive 5 years ago. One key driver of the business case was to reduce insurance costs and liability. According to Whitson, “There’s a solid return on investment in regards to dash cams. No other tool will provide such an immediate ROI from a protection or liability standpoint.”
But what is a good solution for Bennett is, unfortunately, unlikely to become a good solution for the industry.
The freight industry has a long tail, meaning that small fleets – defined as fleets of 1-6 trucks – collectively handle the vast majority of the nation’s trucking capacity. These small firms work on thin margins; very few use camera safety systems. Bennett’s owner operators all do.
