After a Carrier Crash: A Broker's First 72 Hours

A carrier you dispatched is involved in a serious crash. After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, there is a real chance your brokerage becomes a defendant in a negligent-selection claim. What you do in the first 72 hours — before any lawsuit is filed — can determine whether your defense is built on a clean record or on damage control.

This is an operational playbook, not legal advice. Every brokerage should develop its incident-response plan with counsel before an incident, so the plan exists when it is needed and is not improvised under pressure.

Why the first 72 hours matter so much

Two things happen immediately after a catastrophic crash. First, evidence about what your brokerage knew and did begins to age, scatter, and in some systems auto-delete. Second, people inside your organization start talking and writing about it — often informally, often in ways that read very differently in a deposition than they did in the moment.

The first window is about preservation. The second is about discipline. Get both right and a defensible case stays defensible. Get them wrong and even sound underlying work becomes hard to defend.

Hour 0–24: Notify, engage, and freeze

Notify your insurer and broker

Report the incident through your insurance program promptly and per your policy's notice provisions. Late notice can itself jeopardize coverage. This is not the step to "wait and see" on.

Engage counsel immediately

Bring in qualified transportation counsel at once — not after a complaint is served. Early counsel involvement shapes everything that follows: the litigation hold, the privilege posture, internal communications, and what gets gathered and how. Much of the most valuable work in these cases happens before anyone is sued.

Issue a litigation hold

A litigation hold is a documented instruction to preserve everything potentially relevant and to suspend any routine deletion that would destroy it. Coordinate the scope with counsel, but at minimum it should reach:

• The carrier's vetting file and the point-in-time safety data captured at selection
• The load file: rate confirmation, tender, dispatch records, tracking, BOL, communications
• All internal and external communications about this carrier and this load — email, TMS messages, chat, text
• TMS records, including status and audit history for the carrier
• Phone and dispatch records
• Your written vetting policies and training materials in effect at the time

Critically, the hold must suspend auto-deletion. Email and messaging retention rules that quietly purge data on a 30- or 90-day cycle will destroy the most important evidence in the case if the hold does not stop them. Confirm suspension in writing; do not assume IT did it.

Hour 24–72: Preserve correctly and communicate with discipline

Do not alter, backfill, or "clean up" anything

This cannot be overstated. The instinct to "complete" a thin vetting file, tidy up notes, or reconstruct what was probably checked is catastrophic. Altered or backfilled records, once exposed, do more damage than the original gap ever would — they convert a negligence argument into a spoliation and credibility argument, which is far worse. Preserve the record exactly as it exists, including its gaps. Counsel deals with gaps; counsel cannot undo tampering.

Gather the point-in-time file — as it existed

Locate and preserve the vetting file as it stood at the time of selection: what was checked, what the data showed then, the decision, the approver, the timestamps. If your process captured a point-in-time snapshot, this is the moment that investment pays off. If it only stored a live link, preserve whatever exists and tell counsel exactly what is and is not available — accurately.

Impose communications discipline

Assume every internal message about this incident is a future exhibit. Brief the team, through counsel, that:

• Speculation about fault, "what we should have caught," or "we always knew that carrier was sketchy" — written down — becomes the plaintiff's case, regardless of whether it is true.
• Discussion of the incident should be limited, factual, and routed as counsel directs to protect privilege where it applies.
• No one freelances communications with the other side, the carrier, or anyone presenting as an investigator without counsel's involvement.

This is not about hiding anything. It is about not manufacturing misleading evidence through careless words about an event no one has fully reconstructed yet.

Map what plaintiff's counsel will request

Within days, plan for the discovery that is coming. Plaintiff's counsel will seek the carrier's FMCSA authority and safety record, your vetting file, your written policies and training, the load and dispatch records, and internal communications. Knowing the target list now lets counsel ensure all of it is preserved intact — and lets you see your own case the way the other side will.

The connection to everything you did before the crash

The brutal truth of the first 72 hours is that they mostly reveal work that was or wasn't done months earlier. You cannot create a defensible point-in-time vetting record after a crash — you can only preserve the one you already built. The incident-response plan protects the defense; the vetting file and ongoing monitoring record are the defense.

That is why post-Montgomery risk management is front-loaded. The 72-hour playbook matters enormously — but it preserves value, it does not create it. The value was created when you ran a disciplined, documented process before the load ever moved.

The bottom line

In the first 72 hours after a serious crash: notify your insurer, engage counsel immediately, issue a litigation hold that actually suspends auto-deletion, preserve everything exactly as it exists, and impose strict communications discipline. Do not alter a single record. Build this plan with counsel now, while it is hypothetical — because when it is real, you will not have time to design it.

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This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Develop an incident-response and litigation-hold plan with qualified counsel specific to your operations and jurisdictions.