The short version: As of May 14, 2026, freight brokers and anyone who arranges transportation can be sued in state court for negligent carrier selection. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC (No. 24-1238) that FAAAA preemption no longer blocks these claims because choosing a carrier "concerns motor vehicles" and falls inside the law's safety exception. Your defense is now the vetting record you keep at the moment you pick the carrier.
On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that you can be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier. That is what negligent carrier selection now means in practice. Pick a risky carrier, and a negligence claim can reach you. Justice Barrett wrote the opinion. The judgment was unanimous, with a concurrence from Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Alito, noting the question was closer than the majority let on. The case named C.H. Robinson, but the holding reaches everyone who arranges transportation.
For decades, brokers leaned on FAAAA preemption to get negligent-selection claims thrown out. That defense is dead. The Court said choosing a carrier "concerns motor vehicles," so it falls inside the law's safety exception. Translation: negligence claims survive. The case goes to a jury.
If you select carriers, vet vendors, or arrange freight, this is now your problem. Here's how to build a vetting system that actually protects you.
The legal standard is simple. Proving you met it is the hard part.
The standard is ordinary care. Did you act reasonably when you picked the carrier? That sounds easy until you're in a deposition two years later.
Plaintiffs' attorneys won't ask what you usually do. They'll ask what you checked on that load, on that day, before that truck moved. They'll subpoena the carrier's SAFER snapshot, CSA scores, and crash history as they existed at the time of selection. They'll pull your internal notes, your emails, any message where someone flagged a concern.
A record built from memory after a crash is not a defense. A contemporaneous record is. That single distinction separates a case you win from a case you settle.
Most vetting still runs on manual checks. Someone pulls an FMCSA screenshot, drops it in a folder, updates a spreadsheet, and moves on. It feels like diligence. In court, it falls apart.
Manual records rarely carry a timestamp you can trust. Safety data changes constantly, so last quarter's snapshot proves nothing about today's decision. Files go stale. People skip steps under deadline pressure. And exceptions, the loads where someone overrode the process, almost never get documented.
That last gap is where you get hurt. Inconsistency signals an absence of process. If your team vets carefully four times and waves one carrier through, the one you skipped becomes the case against you.
You need three things working together, every time, without depending on anyone's memory.
Do those three things and you've turned vetting from a liability into evidence.
This is the work Veroot was built for. We combine compliance software with hands-on subject matter experts to operationalize vendor management and carrier vetting.
Veroot pulls carrier and vendor data in real time and timestamps every check against the USDOT it belongs to. You stop chasing screenshots. You get a defensible system of record that shows exactly what you knew, from what source, on the day you made the call.
Collect once, reuse everywhere. The same evidence that protects you in litigation proves your trustworthiness to customers and insurers. Our experts help you write the standard, set the thresholds, and handle the exceptions so your process holds up under scrutiny.
Audit prep drops from weeks to hours. Vetting goes from a manual scramble to a continuous, monitored workflow. And when a claim lands, you're reaching for a record, not building one.
Montgomery raised the cost of getting this wrong. It also raised the value of getting it right.
Shippers are already asking how their partners vet carriers. Insurers are watching too. A documented, real-time carrier vetting system is fast becoming a requirement to keep the accounts you have and win the ones you want. The operators who treat this as a growth signal will pull ahead.
You can keep running vetting on spreadsheets and hope no load ever goes wrong. Or you can build a system that proves your care, protects your business, and signals trust to every customer you serve.
What is negligent carrier selection? It's a state-law negligence claim that a broker or other transportation arranger failed to use ordinary care when choosing a carrier, and that failure contributed to a crash or loss. After Montgomery, these claims can proceed in court instead of being dismissed on preemption.
Does FAAAA preemption still protect brokers? Not for safety-based negligent selection claims. The Supreme Court held that selecting a carrier "concerns motor vehicles" and falls within the FAAAA safety exception, so those claims are no longer preempted. Claims with no relationship to safety can still be preempted.
What records defend a negligent carrier selection claim? A contemporaneous, timestamped record of what you checked before the load moved: operating authority, insurance, FMCSA safety rating, CSA scores, and crash history as they existed at the time of selection, plus documentation of any exceptions and who approved them.
Who is liable, the broker or the carrier? The carrier remains responsible for its own operation. Montgomery adds a separate exposure. The broker or arranger can also be sued for how it selected that carrier. Both can end up in front of the jury.
The ruling is settled. Your exposure is real. Your defense is the record you keep.
See where your carrier vetting process would hold up and where it wouldn't. Talk to a Veroot compliance specialist.