Who’s Really Vetting Your Carrier?

A landmark Supreme Court ruling just changed what freight broker accountability looks like. Here’s what shippers need to ask.

On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a unanimous 9-0 decision that sent ripples through every corner of the North American freight industry. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, the Court held that certain state law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers are not automatically barred by federal law and may proceed under the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act’s (“FAAAA”) safety exception, a part of federal law that has been at the center of broker liability disputes for years.

The case stemmed from a 2017 crash in Illinois, where a truck operated by a contracted carrier, selected and dispatched by one of the country’s largest freight brokers, struck another driver and left him with permanent injuries. A key detail: the carrier had a conditional safety rating from the FMCSA at the time it was selected. The question before the Court wasn’t whether the crash happened. It was whether the broker bore any responsibility for choosing that carrier in the first place.

The answer, delivered unanimously by all nine justices: yes, those negligence claims may proceed under state law.

Why This Ruling Matters More Than You Think

For shippers, this decision has a downstream implication that doesn’t always get discussed in the initial coverage: your broker’s carrier selection process cannot be merely an operational preference; Montgomery increases scrutiny of whether a broker exercised reasonable care in its selection.

If a broker you’ve engaged selects an unsafe carrier, causes a crash, and a lawsuit follows, the legal exposure doesn’t stop at the broker. The reputational fallout, supply chain disruption, and potential downstream exposure, depending on the contractual structure and operational involvement, can affect your business as well. At minimum, it disrupts your freight and your relationships with those who depend on it.

Importantly, the Court did not hold that brokers are automatically liable whenever a crash occurs, nor does the decision prohibit brokers from using carriers with conditional safety ratings or create strict liability for brokered freight movements. Instead, the ruling simply allows certain negligence claims to proceed where plaintiffs allege that the broker failed to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier.

This ruling is a signal. It’s the judiciary telling the market what shippers should have been asking their brokers all along: How do you actually vet the carriers you put on our freight?

The Minimum Standard — and Why It’s Not Enough

Most freight brokers check the basics. They confirm that a carrier has active FMCSA operating authority, pull a USDOT number, verify insurance certificates, and check CSA scores in the SAFER database. This is the industry floor — the bare minimum to confirm a carrier is legally allowed to move freight.

The problem is that the floor is pretty low. While FMCSA data remains an important baseline, many sophisticated risk indicators exist outside a standard SAFER snapshot.

A carrier can have active authority, adequate paper insurance, and acceptable CSA scores while still carrying serious red flags: a history of driver qualification failures, recent crashes in jurisdictions known for large verdicts, a pattern of hours-of-service violations, or worse — a conditional safety rating like the one that was on this carrier’s record at the time of dispatch.

This case isn’t an outlier. It’s a spotlight.

The industry’s dirty secret is that carrier vetting is often treated as a compliance checkbox rather than a risk management process. Brokers under pressure to cover loads quickly, and in a competitive market, that pressure is constant, may run a cursory check, see nothing obviously disqualifying, and move on.

What Best-in-Class Carrier Vetting Actually Looks Like

The tools to do this right exist. The question is whether brokers are using them.

Highway has emerged as a leading platform for carrier identity verification and fraud prevention. Beyond confirming a carrier’s FMCSA credentials, Highway verifies carrier identity in real-time to guard against double brokering, chameleon carriers (those who shut down under one name and reopen under another to escape their violation history), and outright fraud. Its Lane Certainty™ algorithm matches carrier data to identify the right capacity based on actual operational patterns, not just what a carrier claims. When a broker uses Highway, they’re not just confirming a carrier exists; they’re confirming it is who it says it is.

Bluewire takes vetting into territory most brokers never explore: severity risk. Bluewire’s AI platform evaluates over 750,000 motor carriers across nine critical severity gap categories, the exact vulnerabilities that plaintiff attorneys exploit to win nuclear verdicts. Their proprietary GAP Score surfaces the kind of deep operational and compliance patterns that don’t show up in a basic FMCSA check but have a track record of turning a fender-bender into a seven-figure courtroom outcome. For a broker trying to protect both their clients and themselves in a post-Montgomery world, this is the kind of intelligence that matters. Notably, Bluewire and Highway have partnered to deliver this GAP Score data directly within Highway’s platform, giving proactive brokers a single workflow for both identity verification and severity risk assessment.

Carrier 411 provides ongoing monitoring of carrier safety ratings, BASIC scores, insurance status, and authority, with automated alerts when something changes. This is a critical piece that’s often missing from broker workflows: continuous monitoring, not just a one-time check at onboarding. A carrier that was clean when you first booked them six months ago may not be clean today. Carrier 411 closes that gap.

The distinction between brokers who use tools like these and brokers who don’t isn’t a technicality. It’s the difference between a carrier vetting process built on genuine risk intelligence and one built on hope.

What to Ask Your Broker

The Montgomery ruling has shifted the legal landscape, but it’s also given shippers a perfectly legitimate reason to ask harder questions of the partners who move their freight. Here’s a starting point:

• What carrier vetting tools do you use, and how current is the data? A good answer names specific platforms and describes real-time or ongoing monitoring, not just a one-time check.
• How do you handle carriers with conditional or marginal safety ratings? There should be a defined policy, not a judgment call made under load pressure.
• How do you identify chameleon carriers or double brokers? If they don’t know what a chameleon carrier is, that’s your answer.
• What does your carrier monitoring look like after onboarding? Vetting at the point of setup isn’t enough. Safety performance changes, and so does compliance status.
• Have you reviewed your carrier network in light of the Montgomery decision? Forward-thinking brokers have already been asking these questions internally.

The Higher Standard

The brokers who were already doing this right, running deep vetting, continuous monitoring, and treating carrier selection as a risk management function rather than an administrative hurdle, aren’t scrambling in the wake of this ruling. They built their processes around the principle that who you put on a load matters, legally and operationally, long before the court formalized it.

Carriers and sophisticated brokers like Bison Transport, who maintain rigorous carrier qualification standards that go well beyond FMCSA minimums, have long understood that safety isn’t a liability shield; it’s a supply chain value. The Montgomery decision just made that value legible to the legal system.

For shippers, the takeaway is simple: the cheapest brokerage quote and the safest carrier selection process rarely come from the same place. In a world where a broker’s negligent hiring decision can now follow a freight chain all the way to a courthouse, knowing who’s actually vetting your carrier isn’t due diligence.

It’s common sense.

Bison Transport is a leading North American freight broker with operations across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Bison’s carrier vetting program exceeds FMCSA minimum standards and includes ongoing safety performance monitoring for all carriers in its network.