Transportation — Carmack Amendment

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Transportation — Carmack Amendment

Where multiple parties are alleged to be responsible for a shipping loss, summary judgment was inappropriate.

“Here, the chain appears to go from TAMS to Comtrans to ACS to Atlas, but the facts pertaining to ACS’s role—in particular whether it was functioning as the kind of intermediary to which the Supreme Court was referring in Kirby—are murky at best. According to Atlas, ACS is a freight broker that coordinates the billing for Comtrans’s vendors. Atlas represents that ACS served many roles for it, including that of financial intermediary between TAMS and Atlas. Atlas argues that the ACS-Atlas contract, which establishes the shipment terms and charges, was automatically triggered when ACS tendered TAMS’s load to Atlas. Nipponkoa disputes Atlas’s characterization of ACS’s role in TAMS’s trade show equipment shipments. It argues that ACS is merely Atlas’s invoicing agent. To support that point, it notes that ACS is not registered as a freight broker, as required under 49 U.S.C. § 13901. Nipponkoa also cites Curtis’s testimony to the effect that ACS takes care of Comtrans’s invoicing. At oral argument, Atlas’s counsel conceded that ACS and Atlas are owned by the same person and have the same mailing address. All we can say, in light of this, is that there are material disputed issues of fact on the question whether ACS was an entity independent from Atlas.”

Reversed and Remanded.

11-3085 Nipponkoa Ins. Co., Ltd., . Atlas Van Lines, Inc.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Young, J., Wood, J.