Freight Transportation: Supreme Court Rules Against Brokers in Montgomery Case

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Freight Transportation: Supreme Court Rules Against Brokers in Montgomery Case

Update

May 14, 2026 03:28 PM GMT

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLCMFreight Transportation | North America Ravi Shanker

Equity Analyst

Supreme Court Rules Against Ravi.Shanker@morganstanley.comMadison J Pasterchick +1 212 761-6350

Research Associate

Madison.Pasterchick@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-3787

Brokers in Montgomery Case Nancy Hipp

We believe today’s SC decision will be transformative for the Trucking industry over Nancy.Hipp@morganstanley.com +1 212 761-1311

time. While some may categorize this ruling as “inconvenient” or only a minor hurdle Freight Transportation

for large brokers, while being existential for small brokers (and indeed potentially North America

Industry View Attractive

drive offsetting share shift from small to large brokers), we have a different view and

we believe this ruling could be a significant headwind to larger brokers as well. We

believe the biggest change that this case could drive is to raise the cost to serve

and ability to scale for all brokers. This means the cost gap between brokers and

asset-heavy trucks could close, which we believe could drive significant share

toward asset-heavy truckers and away from asset-light brokers (since asset-

heavy can offer certainty on price and availability of capacity with a smaller price

gap to brokers than before). This will impact brokers of all sizes, in our view. While

smaller brokers may indeed be the most impacted, it is possible that they could

overcome the capital costs by becoming part of larger brokerage platforms (like

AMZN SCS or digital players, potentially) though that path seems uncertain as well.

We see the asset-based carriers (KNX, SNDR, WERN, ARCB, TFII, ODFL – our