Montgomery Changed the Rules. Here's What Your Carrier File Needs to Show a Jury.

What Happened

On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA) does not preempt state-law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers. Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored the opinion, which drew no dissent. The holding is simple: requiring a broker to exercise ordinary care in selecting a motor carrier concerns motor vehicle safety, and Congress left that domain to the states.

The facts behind the ruling are worth knowing. Shawn Montgomery lost his leg on December 7, 2017, when a Caribe Transport tractor-trailer veered off Illinois Interstate 70 and struck his stopped vehicle. The load had been arranged by a major freight broker. At the time of that carrier selection, Caribe Transport held a conditional safety rating from FMCSA — a rating with documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, and vehicle maintenance. The plaintiff's argument was straightforward: the broker knew, or should have known, about those deficiencies before tendering the load.

The district court dismissed the claim on preemption grounds. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed, unanimously, and resolved the long-running circuit split that had let brokers in some jurisdictions kill these cases before discovery ever began.

This week, the downstream consequences became concrete. One of the country's largest freight brokers disclosed in its Q2 2026 earnings call that it has reduced its approved carrier roster from over 100,000 carriers in 2022 to just over 64,000 — a 35% reduction — and that its approved list dropped another 7% year-over-year in Q2 alone, following a 19% decline in Q1. The company's Chief Safety and Operations Officer stated directly that new technologies and information will continue to drive that number down. Inbound interest from smaller brokers seeking to join networks with stronger vetting infrastructure has accelerated since May 14.

What This Means for Vetting Carriers

Before Montgomery, brokers in circuits like the Seventh and Eleventh could argue that federal law blocked negligent selection claims at the courthouse door. That defense is now gone in all 50 states. The ruling does not create automatic broker liability — a plaintiff still has to prove that the broker failed to exercise reasonable care. But negligent selection claims can now reach a jury, which means the discovery phase happens, documents get produced, and the broker's vetting process is examined in detail.

The question a jury will ask is not whether you used a vetting platform. It is whether your file, at the moment you tendered that specific load to that specific carrier, documented that you checked the right things. A rate confirmation is a selection decision. What did you know when you made it?

That shifts the entire frame for how broker vetting files need to be built. Three signals from the Montgomery facts are directly actionable right now:

Safety rating at the time of tender. Caribe Transport held a conditional safety rating — not satisfactory — when the load was booked. Conditional and unsatisfactory ratings are visible in FMCSA's system. Brokers who book loads on carriers with conditional ratings without documenting a deliberate review of that status now carry a documented gap in their file. A carrier's Safety Rating is one of the fastest checks available and should be timestamped at the point of tender, not at onboarding.

Driver qualification deficiencies. The plaintiff alleged the broker should have known about Caribe's driver-qualification deficiencies. Those deficiencies are reflected in FMCSA's Safety Measurement System (SMS) Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs) — specifically the Driver Fitness BASIC. A carrier with elevated Driver Fitness scores is signaling exactly the category of deficiency at issue in Montgomery.

Authority age and continuity. Newly registered carriers, carriers that have cycled through multiple DOT numbers, or carriers whose authority history shows prior revocations and re-registrations are higher-risk selections. A carrier that has been operating continuously under the same authority for years, with a clean inspection history, is a demonstrably safer pick — and that is exactly the kind of documented rationale a jury can evaluate.

Identity at the point of tender. The question of whether the carrier you booked is actually the carrier that showed up is not just a fraud issue — it is now a liability issue. A broker who tenders a load to a verified carrier but accepts pickup from an unverified driver or an unconfirmed truck has a gap between the selection decision and the execution. Those gaps surface in litigation.

How to Protect Your Business

The Landstar disclosure this week shows what the industry's most litigation-aware operators are actually doing: culling approved carrier lists aggressively, investing in vetting technology, and treating carrier selection as a documented record that may one day be produced in discovery. Smaller brokers don't have Landstar's scale, but they face the same legal standard.

Here is what a defensible carrier file looks like after Montgomery:

Red Flags to Check Before Every Tender

• Safety rating is Conditional or Unsatisfactory — do not tender without a documented, timestamped review and explicit decision rationale on file
• Driver Fitness or Vehicle Maintenance BASIC scores above FMCSA alert thresholds — these are the exact deficiency categories the Montgomery plaintiff cited
• Authority age under 12 months — new entrant carriers have no inspection history and no operating track record to evaluate
• Prior authority revocation or reincarnation pattern — a DOT number that was revoked and re-registered, or a carrier whose principals appear linked to prior revoked entities, is a documented selection risk
• Mismatch between FMCSA-registered phone/email and the contact reaching out to accept a load — spoofed or hijacked carrier identities cannot be caught at onboarding alone; verify at tender
• Insurance certificate issuer cannot be confirmed against FMCSA's active record — a carrier whose certificate on file does not match what FMCSA shows has an immediate authority-and-insurance gap
• No operating history in the state or lane where the load is moving — geographic mismatch between a carrier's registered base and the load origin is a pattern worth flagging

The Montgomery ruling does not require brokers to be perfect. It requires them to be reasonable — and to be able to prove it. Every item on the list above is checkable before a load is tendered. Every check that goes undocumented is a gap a plaintiff's attorney will find.

The brokers who emerge from the post-Montgomery environment in the strongest position are the ones who treat carrier vetting as a legal record, not an administrative step. That record starts with the signals FMCSA makes publicly available — safety ratings, SMS scores, authority history, and insurance status — and it ends with a timestamped, carrier-specific file that exists at the moment of tender, not reconstructed afterward.

The carrier you put on your load is your selection. Own what you knew.