The FAAAA preemption shield does not block state-law negligent-carrier-selection claims against freight brokers. Brokers can now be sued in state court for picking the wrong carrier.
Carrier vetting is no longer a best-practice — it is the new standard of care. Every load tendered without a documented vetting record is uninsured legal exposure on a broker's balance sheet.
For nearly thirty years, freight brokers leaned on the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 (FAAAA) to dismiss negligent-carrier-selection lawsuits before discovery. The argument: state-law negligence claims were preempted because they "related to" broker services. Lower circuits split on it for years, and brokers won most of the early dismissals.
In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, decided unanimously on May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court closed the door. The Court held that FAAAA preemption does not extend to state-law negligent-selection claims — those claims fall within the Act's safety-regulation savings clause and proceed on the merits.
The practical result: a broker who tenders a load to a carrier and that carrier crashes is now exposed to state-court litigation that was previously dismissable as a matter of law. The first question in deposition is the obvious one — what did you do to vet this carrier before you tendered the load?
If the answer isn't paper, the answer is a verdict.
Every tender is now a discoverable decision. Plaintiff's counsel will subpoena your vetting record on the date of loss — what FMCSA data you pulled, what score you saw, what you decided, and why. Without that record, you are defending negligence with silence.
Broker E&O and contingent-cargo books just absorbed a new legal-frequency vector. Underwriting brokers that cannot produce per-tender vetting documentation is now an adverse-selection problem. The defensible book is the documented book.
Brokers post-Montgomery will tender to documentable carriers first. A carrier with a clean, current safety packet and a real Get-to-Green plan is a carrier brokers can defend tendering. The audit trail cuts both ways — and it cuts toward the carriers who can show their work.
CarrierCrusher was built around the premise that a carrier-vetting decision should leave a record. Every score the engine produces, every tender decision a broker logs, every red flag the system surfaces — all of it persists into a per-organization audit trail. That audit trail is the artifact a broker uses to prove they did their job.
One PDF per tender: USDOT vetted, CarrierCrusherScore, hard stops, the reasoning behind CLEARED / MONITOR / REVIEW / DO NOT TENDER, time-stamped, branded to your firm. Court-discoverable. Subpoena-ready.
Every Decision Record, Mock Audit, DataQ filing, and contract review persists into your organization's Defense File forever. One-click compile when litigation discovery hits — eighteen months from now, three years from now, whenever.
The score under the record is grounded in live FMCSA SMS, crash, inspection, and insurance data — refreshed every 24 hours. The deposition question 'what did you know on the date of loss' has an answer with a timestamp.
The platform was designed for the world Montgomery just made real: tender-by-tender documentation, retained forever, exportable on demand. The carrier you cleared last quarter is still in the file when the lawsuit lands.
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