“The accident wasn’t even with our truck. It wasn’t our driver. It was just our trailer.”

Over Valentine’s Day dinner last year, Randy Clifton and his wife, Karyn, decided the fate of the trucking company that had been Randy’s pride and joy for a decade. The odds were stacked against the third-generation trucker. That same month, the bank froze his credit line and his insurance costs doubled, the result of a multimillion-dollar jury verdict for a 2015 accident involving a truck and driver for a motor carrier that Clifton’s company, RCX Solutions Inc., had brokered with to haul a load of cosmetics in an RCX trailer.