The Supreme Court Just Made Carrier Vetting Your Legal Defense: What Montgomery v. Caribe Means for Brokers

For more than a decade, freight brokers had a powerful shield against negligence lawsuits arising from crashes involving the carriers they hired: federal preemption. When a plaintiff sued a broker for negligently selecting an unsafe motor carrier, the broker's first move was usually a motion to dismiss arguing that the claim was preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA). In many courts, that motion worked, and the case ended before discovery.

That shield is now gone. In May 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (No. 24-1238) that the FAAAA does not preempt state-law claims that a broker negligently selected an unsafe carrier. The decision resolves a long-running split among the federal circuits and changes the risk calculus for every brokerage in the country.

This article explains what the Court actually held, what it deliberately left undecided, and — most importantly — how brokers should change their carrier screening process in response. The short version: the quality of your vetting, and your ability to prove it, is now the defense.

The case in brief

The dispute arose from a December 2017 crash on Interstate 70 in Illinois. A tractor-trailer rear-ended a passenger vehicle, and the plaintiff, Shawn Montgomery, suffered catastrophic injuries that included the amputation of his leg. The motor carrier operating the truck was Caribe Transport II. Montgomery did not only pursue the carrier and driver — he also sued the freight broker that arranged the shipment, alleging that the broker negligently selected a carrier with a known safety history that should have disqualified it.

The broker did what brokers had done successfully for years: it argued the claim was preempted by the FAAAA. The lower courts had been split on whether that argument should win, and the Supreme Court took the case to settle the question.

What the Court actually held

The FAAAA contains a broad preemption clause. It bars states from enforcing any law "related to a price, route, or service" of a broker or motor carrier "with respect to the transportation of property." Brokers had long argued that a negligent-selection claim is, at bottom, an attack on how they perform their core service — choosing carriers — and therefore falls squarely within that preemption.

But the FAAAA also contains a safety exception. It preserves "the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles." The entire case turned on whether a common-law negligence claim against a broker fits inside that exception.

Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Barrett held that it does. The reasoning focused on the phrase "with respect to motor vehicles." Read naturally, "with respect to" means concerning or regarding. A claim that a broker negligently put an unsafe carrier on the road is a claim that genuinely concerns motor-vehicle safety — it is about keeping dangerous trucks off the highway. The fact that the claim runs against the broker rather than the carrier or driver does not change its essential character. The negligent-selection claim therefore falls within the safety exception and is not preempted.

The practical effect: the preemption defense that ended so many of these cases at the pleading stage no longer works.

The concurrence matters as much as the holding

Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Alito, concurred. The concurrence is worth reading carefully, because it signals where the real fights will now happen. The concurrence stressed that the case was closer than the majority opinion suggested, observed that Congress's deregulatory aim in the FAAAA was economic rather than a directive to deregulate safety, and pointed to a regulatory gap: federal law imposes minimum insurance requirements on motor carriers but not on brokers, and federal rules governing how brokers select carriers remain thin.

Most importantly for day-to-day operations, the concurrence offered what reads like a roadmap to a defense: brokers "should be able to successfully defend against state tort suits if the brokers have acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies." In other words, the door to liability is now open — but a broker that runs a reasonable, well-documented selection process and hires reputable carriers has a strong answer.

What the Court did not decide

It is just as important to be clear about what this ruling does not do, because the gaps are where litigation will concentrate.

• It did not define the standard of care. The Court did not say what a "reasonable" vetting process looks like, which FMCSA data points a broker must review, or what safety history obligates a broker to reject a carrier. That is now a fact question — decided case by case, often by a jury, with competing expert witnesses.
• It did not create the cause of action. Whether negligent selection is a viable claim, and what its elements are, remains a question of each state's tort law. The Court only removed the federal preemption barrier; it did not manufacture liability where state law provides none.
• It did not resolve the "control" problem. A broker that exercises too much operational control over a carrier can expose itself to vicarious liability under agency theories — a separate and unresolved tension. Doing more diligence is not the same as directing the carrier's operations, and the Court gave no guidance on where that line sits.
• It did not touch preemption for purely economic claims. Claims about pricing, routing, or service that have nothing to do with safety are unaffected by this decision.

What changes in practice for brokers

The headline change is procedural and it is significant: cases that used to be dismissed on preemption will now survive to discovery and trial. That single shift carries a chain of consequences.

Reasonableness becomes a fact question, judged in hindsight. Plaintiffs' attorneys will reconstruct, with the benefit of a tragic outcome, exactly what a reasonable broker should have known and done at the moment the load was tendered. Your defense is not what you believe your process to be — it is what you can prove your process actually was for that specific carrier on that specific day.

Discovery will target your data and your records. Expect requests for the carrier's FMCSA authority status, SAFER and SMS data, BASIC percentile scores, inspection and out-of-service history, crash history, safety rating (especially conditional, unsatisfactory, or unrated), authority age, and insurance filings — alongside your internal emails, vetting files, written policies, training materials, and the actual record of what was reviewed and who approved the carrier.

Insurance exposure rises. Contingent auto liability and broker errors-and-omissions underwriters will scrutinize vetting programs more closely. Expect carriers of your coverage to ask for documented selection procedures, possibly require third-party vetting tooling, and reprice risk accordingly.

Contracts get tighter in both directions. Shippers will push stricter vetting standards, rating floors, insurance-verification requirements, audit rights, and indemnification into broker agreements. Brokers should be pushing equivalent obligations down to carriers, and aligning indemnity and insurance language so that risk lands where it belongs.

How brokers should change their screening process

The good news embedded in the concurrence is that a reasonable, well-documented process is a defense. Building one is now a risk-management priority, not a nice-to-have. The following changes matter most.

1. Move from ad-hoc to a written, consistently applied policy

Informal vetting — a quick authority and insurance check, then tender — is the profile most exposed by this ruling. Adopt a written carrier qualification policy with objective criteria that every coordinator applies the same way, every time. Inconsistency is itself evidence of negligence; a defensible process is one a jury can see was followed uniformly.

2. Define minimum standards and rating floors with a documented exception path

Decide, in writing and in advance, how your brokerage treats:

• Conditional, unsatisfactory, and unrated safety ratings
• BASIC scores above FMCSA intervention thresholds (particularly Unsafe Driving and Crash Indicator)
• Crash history, weighted by severity rather than raw count
• Out-of-service rates above the national average
• Authority age, especially carriers inside their first 12–18 months

The standard need not be "reject every imperfect carrier" — that is neither realistic nor required. What matters is that deviations go through a documented exception and sign-off process, so an approval of a borderline carrier reflects a deliberate, recorded judgment rather than an oversight.

3. Capture a point-in-time record of what you knew, when you knew it

This is the single most important defensive change, and it deserves emphasis. Reasonableness is judged on the information available at the time of selection, not the information surfaced after a crash. A vetting process that does not preserve a timestamped snapshot of the safety data reviewed and the decision rationale leaves you defending the most important moment of the case from memory.

The goal is to be able to produce, years later, a clean answer to one question: what did this carrier's safety profile look like at the moment we tendered the load, and why was approving them reasonable on that data?

4. Monitor continuously, not once

A carrier that was clean at onboarding can deteriorate within months. Authority revocations, insurance lapses, out-of-service orders, and significant SMS deterioration should trigger alerts and automatic holds in your TMS — and those monitoring events should themselves be part of the record. Re-vet on a defined cadence, and more often for high-volume or high-value lanes.

5. Mind the control line

Do more diligence on selection; do not assume operational control. Direct objective, data-driven selection criteria — not dispatch decisions, routing, or driver management — so that a more rigorous vetting program does not inadvertently feed a vicarious-liability theory. Select carefully; do not operate the carrier.

6. Retain records with litigation in mind

Vetting files, carrier-selection communications, written policies, and training materials are now discoverable evidence. Reassess email and messaging retention. The brokerage that can produce a complete, contemporaneous file looks reasonable; the one reconstructing it from fragments looks negligent regardless of what it actually did.

The principle underneath all of it

Every recommendation above reduces to one idea: a documented, consistently executed, point-in-time vetting process is now a legal asset. Before Montgomery, the strongest defense was procedural — preemption. After Montgomery, the strongest defense is evidentiary — proof that you ran a reasonable process and hired a reputable carrier on the data available at the time. Brokers who already treat carrier vetting as a disciplined, recorded workflow are in a far stronger position than those who treat it as a formality.

Where CarrierBook Intelligence fits

This ruling rewards exactly the kind of process CarrierBook Intelligence was built to support. Each assessment pulls current FMCSA data and produces a risk score across documented factors, stored as a persistent, timestamped record for that carrier and account — a point-in-time snapshot of what the safety profile looked like when you ran it, with a downloadable report you can file. Watchlist monitoring then flags authority, insurance, out-of-service, crash, and safety-rating changes on the carriers you've already approved, so deterioration after onboarding does not go unnoticed.

None of that is a substitute for legal counsel, and no tool can guarantee a particular outcome in litigation. What it can do is make a reasonable, consistently applied, well-documented selection process the default rather than the exception — which is precisely what the Montgomery concurrence indicated a broker needs to be able to defend.

Bottom line

The Supreme Court did not declare brokers liable for every carrier crash. It did something narrower and, for the industry, more consequential: it removed the federal off-ramp that ended these cases early and put the reasonableness of your carrier selection in front of juries. The brokers who adapt will be the ones who can show — with records, not recollection — that they ran a disciplined process and hired carriers a reasonable broker would have hired.

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This article is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. The contours of broker liability vary by state and continue to develop; consult qualified transportation counsel about your specific operations and contracts.

Sources and further reading:

• Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238 — Supreme Court opinion (PDF)
• SCOTUSblog: Court rules freight brokers can face negligent hiring suits under state law
• Bricker Graydon: SCOTUS — FAAAA Does Not Preempt Negligent-Selection Claims — What Brokers, Carriers and Shippers Should Do Now
• Matthiesen, Wickert & Lehrer: Broker Liability After Montgomery
• Heavy Duty Trucking: Supreme Court Ruling Puts Freight Broker Vetting Practices in Spotlight