Negligent carrier selection is the claim that you failed to use reasonable care when choosing a motor carrier, and that the failure helped cause the harm. It is ordinary state negligence law — duty, breach, causation, damages. What changed in Montgomery is that a broker can no longer end the claim early on federal preemption, so it now turns on the facts of your selection and the evidence you can produce about it.
Why this claim is unusually dangerous
Most of the evidence is public, permanent, and timestamped — and none of it is yours.
FMCSA data about the carrier's authority, safety rating, inspections, out-of-service rates and crashes is retrievable as of the date you tendered. A plaintiff's expert reconstructs exactly what you could have seen that morning. Your side of the ledger is whatever you kept.
That asymmetry is the whole problem. The plaintiff's exhibit is a clean historical record. Yours is often a rep's recollection and a browser tab that no longer exists.
What the expert looks for
- A knowable red flag you did not check. A conditional safety rating, an out-of-service percentage far above the national average, lapsed insurance on file.
- A flag you saw and passed anyway, with no stated reason. An override without a rationale is worse than no override — it proves you knew.
- An onboarding file frozen in time. Vetted once at onboarding, never rechecked, and the authority was revoked eight months before the crash.
- Selection criteria that exist on paper and nowhere else. A written policy nobody followed is impeachment material, not a defense.
- Identity you never confirmed. The carrier you approved and the carrier that hauled the load were not the same entity.
"We ran a check" is not evidence. The question is not whether you had access to data. It is whether you can show what was reviewed, by whom, when, and what they concluded. Access is not diligence, and a dashboard is not a record.
What a defensible file contains
| Element | The artifact |
|---|---|
| Identity verified | Resolved MC/DOT with the identity signals checked, including any link to a prior revoked authority. |
| Risk assessed | The signals as they stood at tender, each traceable to its source record — not a bare score. |
| Decision documented | Named decider, fixed timestamp, the decision, and the stated reason for any override. |
| Monitoring maintained | Material post-tender changes appended to the same file through the claim date. |
The override problem
Reps will proceed past flags. That is not a defect — commercial judgment is legitimate, and a system that blocks it gets routed around, which produces no record at all.
The requirement is that an override be documented: who overrode, when, and why. A documented override shows a human weighed a known risk and made a business decision. An undocumented one, discovered in the file two years later, looks like concealment.
Shippers are not outside this
The duty attaches to the act of selection. A shipper that picks its own carriers, maintains an approved-carrier list, or overrides its broker's choice is exercising that selection and can be sued on the same theory. See what this means for shippers.
Bring the record to your desk.
A 20-minute scoping call — no cost, no commitment. Bring your current carrier-selection process and we will show you what it produces at claim time.
See if we can help