What Montgomery v. Caribe Means for Freight Brokers and Shippers

If you read one thing about the Supreme Court's Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II decision, make it this. I'm going to explain — in plain English, no law degree required — what the Court actually decided, what "negligent carrier selection" means, why it now applies to essentially every freight broker and the shippers behind them, and the single distinction that will separate the brokers who survive this from the ones who get buried: the difference between having a carrier packet and actually screening a carrier.

This is the cornerstone. Everything else I write about broker liability builds on it.

The decision in plain English

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0, in an opinion by Justice Barrett, that freight brokers can be sued under state negligence law when they tender freight to an unsafe carrier and someone gets hurt. For roughly fifteen years, brokers had argued that a federal law — the FAAAA (49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)) — preempted these claims, meaning state courts couldn't hear them. Some courts agreed; some didn't; the question split the federal appeals courts. Montgomery resolved it, unanimously, against the brokers.

The reasoning had two parts, both simple once you cut through the jargon:

• The safety exception. The FAAAA blocks state laws "related to" a broker's prices, routes, or services — but it carves out the states' authority over motor-vehicle safety. The Court held that a claim for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier is fundamentally a safety claim, so it lives inside the carveout and isn't preempted.
• Ordinary background duties aren't "regulation." Even apart from the carveout, the Court said the basic legal duty to act with ordinary care — a duty every business in every industry owes — isn't a special "regulation of broker services." It applies to brokers the same way it applies to everyone.

Bottom line: brokers owe a duty of ordinary care when they select carriers. The federal shield is gone. The cases proceed on the merits.

What "negligent carrier selection" actually means

The legal term is negligent selection (you'll also hear "negligent hiring" of an independent contractor). Strip away the lawyer words and it means this:

The standard is ordinary care, not perfection. You don't have to guarantee no carrier you ever use will crash. You have to do what a reasonable, prudent professional would do — which, at a minimum, means looking at the carrier's safety record before you hand them the load. The whole case turns on a question a juror can understand instantly: did you look, and was your decision reasonable given what you saw — or should have seen?

Why the facts of Montgomery are so damning — and so clarifying

The reason this case became the vehicle is the facts. The carrier, Caribe Transport II, wasn't a borderline call. On the day the broker tendered the load, Caribe had:

• A Conditional safety rating (the middle, "not great" rating)
• Alert status in two safety categories — Hours-of-Service Compliance and Unsafe Driving
• Crash rates about three times the national average

And the driver who later crossed a median and cost Shawn Montgomery his leg had been awake 22 of the prior 28 hours, with a two-year history of hours-of-service violations.

Here's the line from the case that every broker and shipper should tattoo somewhere: all of that safety data was free, public, and one query away. No paid subscription. No phone call. The Court leaned on exactly that point. When the warning signs are sitting in a free government database and nobody clicks, "we didn't know" isn't a defense — it's the plaintiff's whole case.

That's also the clarifying part. Montgomery doesn't ask you to be psychic. It asks you to look at information that's already free and public. That's a meetable standard.

The distinction that decides everything: a packet is not a screen

Now the most important practical idea in this entire article, because it's where most brokers think they're protected and aren't.

Almost every broker has a carrier packet — the onboarding paperwork they collect when they first set a carrier up: the W-9, the authority, a certificate of insurance, a signed agreement. Brokers point to the packet and say "see, we vet our carriers."

A carrier packet is not a carrier screen. Here's the difference, and it's the difference between losing and winning a negligent-selection case:

• A packet is collected once, at onboarding, and then sits in a file. It tells you the carrier existed and had authority and insurance on the day you set them up — maybe eighteen months before the load that crashed.
• A screen is performed at tender, every time, and captures the carrier's current safety profile — rating, BASIC scores, OOS rates, crash history, insurance status — as it exists on the day you're entrusting them with this load.

Carrier safety decays. A carrier that was clean at onboarding can be in Alert status, mid-insurance-cancellation, or carrying a fresh crash cluster by the time you tender the load that ends up in court. The packet won't catch any of it. Montgomery's duty of ordinary care is judged at the moment of selection — the tender — not at the moment of onboarding. A broker waving an eighteen-month-old packet at a jury is not showing reasonable care at tender; they're showing they stopped looking.

So the post-Montgomery question isn't "do you have a carrier packet?" Everyone does. It's "do you have a screen — a dated, per-load record of the carrier's safety profile as it existed when you tendered?"

What brokers and shippers must change now

The to-do list is short and concrete:

1. Screen at tender, not just at onboarding. Capture the carrier's current FMCSA safety profile every time you tender, against a written standard. This is the core change.

2. Write down your standard. Define what disqualifies a carrier (e.g., Conditional/Unsatisfactory without review, Alert-status safety BASICs, inadequate or lapsing insurance, a crash pattern). Now "reasonable care" is defined by you, not by a plaintiff's expert.

3. Capture carrier attestations. Get the carrier's signed representations about insurance and safety tied to the load, so that if they lied, your reliance was reasonable.

4. Timestamp and retain. Make the record immutable, dated, and kept for years — long enough to outlast the litigation window.

5. For shippers: push it down your broker contracts. Require brokers to screen and retain records, and verify they can produce them.

The throughline

Montgomery didn't invent a scary new burden. It removed an escape hatch and confirmed an old, fair principle: if you choose who drives the heavy truck near someone's family, use reasonable care, and be able to show you did. The data is free. The standard is ordinary care. The only real failure mode is doing the diligence invisibly — or mistaking a dusty onboarding packet for an actual screen.

That gap is the entire reason DOTScreener exists: to turn carrier selection into a per-load, timestamped, attestation-backed screen — not a packet — so that "we exercised reasonable care" is a document you can put in front of a jury, captured the day you tendered. The Supreme Court just made that the standard for the whole industry. The brokers and shippers who internalize the packet-vs-screen distinction this week are the ones who'll be fine.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

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Sources

• Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, 608 U.S. ___ (2026) — unanimous opinion (Barrett, J.)
• 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c) — FAAAA preemption and the motor-vehicle safety exception
• Restatement (Second) of Torts § 411 — Negligent Selection of an Independent Contractor
• FMCSA SAFER Company Snapshot — Conditional ratings, OOS rates, crash history
• FMCSA Safety Measurement System (CSA BASICs) — HOS and Unsafe Driving Alert thresholds