Carrier Vetting After Montgomery: The 5-Minute Fix

The one-sentence summary

Negligent selection is judged on the decision, not the outcome: was your choice reasonable given what you could know at the time? A broker who checks a carrier's safety record before tendering and documents that check has met the standard. That's the entire post-Montgomery landscape in one sentence.

What changed on May 14

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the FAAAA doesn't shield brokers from state negligent-hiring claims. The practical effect: carrier selection is now judged under ordinary state negligence law, the same standard that already governs most professional decisions. The federal-preemption shortcut — "federal law preempts this claim" — no longer ends the inquiry. What does is whether your selection was reasonable, given what you could know at the time.

But the Court also made clear what a successful defense looks like: reasonable care in carrier selection, documented at the time of the decision. The standard isn't perfection. It's diligence you can prove.

What the ruling actually did: it removed FAAAA federal preemption as a shield and returned broker carrier-selection to ordinary state negligence law. It did not declare brokers automatically liable — only that the question is now decided the same way other negligence questions are. The answer to that question is a reasonable selection, documented at the time you made it.

On Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, 9-0 (2026)

The problem with how most brokers vet today

Most brokerages check three things at onboarding: active authority, insurance certificate, and maybe a quick look at SAFER. Then the carrier goes on the panel and stays there — sometimes for years — without another safety check.

That was fine when federal preemption protected you. It's not fine anymore:

• × Authority ≠ safety. A carrier can have active authority and a 95th-percentile Unsafe Driving score. Active MC number doesn't mean safe trucks.
• × Onboarding ≠ monitoring. A carrier that was safe 6 months ago may not be safe today. Scores change monthly. One bad inspection spikes a percentile for 24 months.
• × Checking ≠ documenting. Your ops team might glance at SAFER before booking. Can you produce a timestamped record of that check 3 years later in discovery? If not, it didn't happen.

The fix: automated, documented, defensible

The solution isn't hiring a compliance team or building internal tooling. It's adding one API call to your existing workflow that generates the documentation automatically.

What this looks like in practice

1. 1

   Integrate the API into your TMS or booking flow

   One endpoint. REST. JSON response. Most TMS platforms support webhook or pre-booking API calls. Takes your dev team an afternoon.

2. 2

   Set your threshold policy

   Define what percentile scores are acceptable. Document it. Recommended: no BASIC above the FMCSA intervention threshold (65th for UD/HOS, 80th for VM/CS/DF) without documented escalation.

3. 3

   Let the system document for you

   Every query generates a receipt automatically. No manual logging. No spreadsheets. The documentation is the byproduct of the check itself.

4. 4

   Get alerted when carriers deteriorate

   Webhook notifications when a carrier on your panel crosses a threshold. You act — document the decision (continued use with justification, or removal). Either way, it's documented.

The math at every scale

Documented vetting costs less than the legal hour you'd spend defending one undocumented tender. The exact spend depends on your volume.

For context: a negligent-selection claim is a rare event, but defending one — even successfully — costs far more in legal time than a year of documented vetting. Documented selection is inexpensive insurance against a real but uncommon exposure. It's the kind of preparation that's obvious in hindsight and cheap in advance.

A mid-sized brokerage spending $3K/year on Broker-Aware turns "did you check?" from an open question into a documented yes — for every tender, automatically. The math gets easier the bigger the brokerage gets.

For high-volume brokers: the per-load math

If your brokerage runs at scale, the question isn't whether to document your vetting — it's simply how to do it across thousands of tenders without slowing the ops floor down. At a per-check cost of cents, the answer is: automatically, on every tender, as a byproduct of a check you already want to make.

You know your panel size and your tender volume better than any pricing page. Documented vetting makes every one of those tenders a decision you can stand behind later, in writing. That's just how a well-run brokerage operates — and the per-check cost is small enough that the only real question is the volume math.

Lead the change

The standard is live as of the ruling. The brokers who adapt first won't do it because they're worried — they'll do it because documenting a reasonable selection is simply the professional way to operate, and Montgomery made that the explicit bar.

Every load you tender from today forward can carry its own record of the decision behind it. The fix takes an afternoon to implement, costs less than the coffee budget, and turns a question you'd rather not be asked into one you've already answered. That's leadership, not insurance.