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The sky is not falling for freight brokers.
A lot of the noise around the Supreme Court's ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is being driven by tech vendors selling a new product and brokers who weren't doing the work to begin with.
The Court ruled 9-0 that brokers have a duty of reasonable care when selecting carriers. State-law negligent hiring claims are now in play nationwide. Worth noting: in 44 states, brokers were already exposed to these claims. The ruling closed the gap in six. If you were already operating to a defensible standard, not much changes.
The more interesting story is on the shipper side.
For shippers, this opens a real question: where does liability actually sit on your freight today, and where do you want it to sit?
Using a broker can create distance between you and the carrier selection decision. When a shipper books carriers directly, the selection is theirs. When a broker books the carrier, the proximate cause of a bad selection lives with the broker. Not absolute insulation, but a meaningful shift in where the exposure lands.
That protection only works if the broker does the work. A broker without a written carrier selection policy doesn't shield you from anything. They just add a layer. The shippers who actually benefit from this ruling are the ones working with brokers who can show their vetting process in writing and carry contingent broker liability insurance to back it up.
Conditional carriers are now a real risk. The Court pointed to the carrier's conditional safety rating five times in the opinion. Brokers who book conditional carriers without a clear, documented reason are taking on exposure that gets passed back to the shipper when something goes wrong. Real vetting (identity validation, CDL tenure, English proficiency, ongoing safety monitoring) is not optional anymore.
Asset capacity is a hedge. When the spot market is the only option, vetting standards get tested. Carriers with owned trucks reduce the number of selection decisions that have to happen under pressure.
Here is what that looks like in practice at Fresh Freight:
- No conditional carriers.
- No carriers without inspection history.
- No carriers exceeding thresholds in two or more BASIC categories.
- Safety letters issued to any carrier exceeding a threshold in one category.
- Real-time FMCSA rating updates integrated into our platforms, so a carrier's status is current at the moment of dispatch, not a snapshot from 60 days ago.
That is what a defensible standard looks like written down. A broker who can't produce something like it on request is not protecting you.
We built Fresh Freight around perishable freight. The carriers we trust are moving food with a shelf life and a temperature requirement. The standard was already high. The ruling did not change how we vet. It changed what that vetting is worth to our shippers.