A prominent Chattanooga industry could face greater risk of lawsuits after a recent Supreme Court ruling, but two local companies say they’re ready for any heightened scrutiny.
“We feel very good about how we are positioned to navigate this,” Jason Provonsha, CEO of Steam Logistics, said in an email. “We’ve been following the case very closely for a long time, and we were well prepared for how the ruling ultimately came down.”
In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that freight brokerages — businesses that essentially act as the middlemen between the companies that ship goods and those that carry them — can face lawsuits under state law that claim they negligently hired dangerous drivers, according to SCOTUSblog.
Touting nicknames like Freight Alley and the Silicon Valley of Trucking, Chattanooga has a large concentration of brokerages, and local logistics companies regularly appear on lists of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. However, some industry members expect a fairly muted impact from the ruling — especially if businesses have already implemented procedures to carefully vet carriers.