Freight Broker Liability: What Carrier Vetting the Law Now Requires

After the Supreme Court’s May 14, 2026 ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, a freight broker can be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier — federal FAAAA preemption no longer blocks those claims. In plain terms: vet every carrier for safety before you book it, and keep a dated record proving you did.

For two decades, brokers leaned on federal preemption to get negligent-selection cases thrown out before trial. That shield is gone. The vetting you were always supposed to do is now the line between a defensible booking and a lawsuit you pay for — and the deciding factor is whether you can prove what you checked.

What happened

The Supreme Court decided Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (No. 24-1238) on May 14, 2026, after argument on March 4. The vote was 9-0, with the opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and a concurrence from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel Alito. The case arose from a highway crash involving a carrier coordinated by a transportation broker — C.H. Robinson — and the question of whether the injured party could sue the broker under state negligence law.

The Court held that a negligent-hiring claim against a broker is not preemptedby the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA). The act’s safety exception — 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)(2)(A) — preserves the states’ authority to regulate safety “with respect to motor vehicles,” and requiring a broker to use ordinary care when it puts a carrier on the road falls inside that exception. Kavanaugh’s concurrence added the part brokers should read twice: a broker who selects a reputable carrier and acts reasonably should still be able to defend the claim.

What this means for your operation

Strip out the legal language and the practical change is simple. If a carrier you booked is involved in a serious crash, a plaintiff’s attorney can now name your brokerage in a negligent-selection claim in state court, and you can’t get it dismissed on preemption grounds the way brokers used to. The case goes to the facts: did you act reasonably when you picked that carrier?

That makes documentation the whole game.“We always check our carriers” is not evidence. A dated, timestamped record of the authority status, the insurance, and the safety review you ran before you booked that specific loadis. The broker who can produce that record defends the claim; the broker who can’t writes a check. This is exactly the gap most brokerages have — the vetting happens, but it lives in someone’s memory, a browser tab, or a spreadsheet nobody can reconstruct two years later when the suit lands.

None of this asks you to do something new. It raises the stakes on the thing you already knew you should do. The carrier you’d have flagged for a sloppy safety record is now the carrier that turns a routine load into a six-figure exposure — and the verification step that protects you from that lawsuit is the same step that catches double brokering before the truck is dispatched.

Can a freight broker be sued for a carrier’s accident?

Now, yes. Before Montgomery, brokers routinely won dismissal by arguing FAAAA preempted state negligence claims. After it, a negligent-selection claim survives preemption and proceeds on its merits. The exposure is real for any broker that selected the carrier — which is the core function of brokering — so this is not a niche risk.

Does FAAAA still preempt anything?

Yes. The ruling is narrow to safety. State laws that try to regulate a broker’s prices, routes, or servicesremain preempted; the Court did not touch that. What changed is that a state common-law duty to use reasonable care in selecting a safe carrier now fits within the FAAAA safety exception. So your rates and your service terms aren’t suddenly exposed — your carrier-selection decisions are.

What does “reasonable care” actually require?

The Court didn’t publish a checklist, and standards will get tested case by case. But the direction is clear from the opinion and the concurrence: select reputable carriers, and act reasonably in doing so. In day-to-day terms, that means you can show you looked at the things a careful broker looks at before handing over a load.

How to document carrier vetting after Montgomery

Here is the checklist a broker can run today. The point isn’t just to do these checks — it’s to capture them, dated to the booking, so the record exists if you ever need it.

1. Verify FMCSA authority and operating status before every booking

Confirm the carrier’s MC/DOT authority is active and in good standing at the moment you book — not from a file you pulled six months ago. An inactive or revoked authority is the first thing the other side’s attorney will check, and a stale record is no defense.

2. Confirm insurance is active and adequate

Check that cargo and liability coverage are in force and meet the load’s requirements, and capture that status as of the booking date. Coverage that lapsed before the load moved is a fact you want to have caught, not one you discover in discovery.

3. Review the safety record before you book

Pull the carrier’s safety rating and CSA/SMS scores and look at the unsafe-driving and crash indicators. Booking a carrier with known unsafe ratings is the exact fact pattern these suits are built on. If the numbers are bad, that’s a decision to document — or to make differently.

4. Screen for identity red flags

Match the contact details, email domain, and remittance information to the FMCSA filing, and treat a brand-new authority with extra caution. This step is doing double duty: it supports your reasonable-selection defense andit’s your front line against double brokering and payment fraud.

5. Timestamp the decision and keep the record

Store the authority, insurance, and safety review against the load, dated to the booking, and retain it. The record is the difference between a defensible selection and a settlement. Plan to keep it for years — at least through your state’s personal-injury statute of limitations.

Where the system comes in

Every one of these checks is easy to do and easy to skip when a desk is slammed and a truck is needed now. That’s the same reason fraud works — and now it’s the same reason a brokerage ends up undefended. The durable fix is to make vetting part of the workflow rather than a discipline someone has to remember: a freight broker system that verifies the carrier against FMCSA at booking, holds the vetted identity on the load, and keeps the dated record automatically. After Montgomery, that record isn’t paperwork. It’s your defense.

• The shield is gone: negligent-selection claims against brokers survive FAAAA preemption.
• The defense is reasonable care: select reputable carriers and act reasonably.
• The proof is the record: a dated, per-load vetting trail is what wins.