On May 15, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that federal preemption does not shield freight brokers from state negligent hiring claims. Justice Barrett’s opinion held that the FAAAA’s safety exception covers exactly this kind of suit. Brokers who select unsafe carriers can now be sued in state court.

JJ Singh, CEO of EKA Solutions, argues in a new piece that the ruling should change how shippers run their RFPs — and that most shippers have no data to run them differently even if they wanted to.

The visibility gap

Singh’s starting point will be familiar to anyone who has managed freight: the morning status call. Supply chain managers spend their first hours chasing updates across fragmented broker and carrier systems, working from information that is already stale by the time it arrives. Freight moves; the record of it does not keep up.

The consequence is not just wasted mornings. It is that when RFP season arrives, shippers grade partners on rate and relationship, because those are the only variables they can actually measure. On-time performance, tender acceptance, claims history, billing accuracy — the metrics that determine whether freight actually gets delivered — sit in nobody’s system in usable form.

Meanwhile the real cost of a load surfaces after the fact, in detention, lumper fees and liftgate charges that were never in the quoted rate.

Why location tracking isn’t visibility

The sharpest section of the article takes on the assumption that a tracking platform solves this. Singh’s position is that knowing where a truck is tells you very little about whether service commitments are being met. Location data misses run-to-pickup, dock dwell, line haul and final delivery as distinct phases — and it sits outside the systems where orders, exceptions and payment actually live.

His alternative is exception management: predictive ETAs that flag a load the moment it slips past an SLA threshold, severity weighted by where in the journey the delay occurs, and a single record maintained from order through payment.

The scorecard is the point

The payoff is that a year of this data lets a shipper grade brokers and carriers objectively. Singh proposes six questions to put into your next RFP. Among them: Can the partner produce auditable documentation proving carrier vetting on every load? Are their performance numbers system-generated or self-reported? How fast can they detect and communicate an at-risk load?

That last set matters more post-Montgomery than it did a year ago. The article cites an Inbound Logistics figure that 94% of federally authorized carriers carry no FMCSA safety rating at all — which means vetting cannot be a one-time onboarding checkbox. It has to be continuous, and it has to leave a paper trail.

Read the full piece

The complete article — including all six RFP scorecard questions and the full breakdown of what EKA’s On-Time system tracks — is worth reading in full before your next bid cycle.

Read “On-Time Performance Should Decide Which Brokers and Carriers Get Your Freight” at EKA →

Shippers evaluating their own visibility stack can learn more about EKA’s platform at go-eka.ai.