On May 14, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that freight brokers can be sued under state negligent-hiring law for the carriers they pick. The case is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II and the practical effect is that brokers are starting to look at carriers the way an underwriter looks at a fleet. Carriers who can produce documented safety records on request will start winning loads. Carriers who cannot will start losing them.
For most fleets the ruling will not arrive as a lawsuit. It will arrive as a broker who suddenly wants to inspect your safety records before tendering a load. Why that shift is happening starts with what the court decided.
What the unanimous opinion says
The opinion runs eight pages. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote it, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito. Nine justices, no dissent.
The court’s ruling was narrow. A 1994 federal law (FAAAA) generally stops state laws from interfering with a broker’s pricing, routes, or services. Negligent hiring lawsuits are claims that a broker failed to adequately vet a motor carrier’s safety record or authority before hiring them. For 20 years, brokers used this law to get those lawsuits dismissed. However, there is an exception: states still have the authority to create and enforce safety rules for motor vehicles.
The Supreme Court read that exception literally. Requiring a broker to use ordinary care in selecting a carrier “concerns motor vehicles,” most obviously the trucks that will haul the load, so a state negligent-hiring claim survives. McFarlane Law’s same-day analysis put it plainly: brokers can now be sued in state court for who they hire.
Why brokers will get pickier about carriers
The week after the ruling, FreightWaves reported that broker insurance carriers were already pushing tighter vetting procedures. That is not panic. It is the normal response to a new exposure that did not exist on May 13.
Anyone who has been in this business for a decade has watched the same pattern play out with insurance, with ELDs, with cargo theft, and with double-brokering. A new liability lands, the people writing the checks get nervous, the vetting bar moves up a notch, and the carriers who already had their paperwork in order pick up the loads from the carriers who did not.
For a fleet that already runs a clean operation, this is closer to an opportunity than a threat. Brokers will start favoring carriers who can produce a safety record on request, because that record is the broker’s own defense if a load ever ends up in a courtroom. The cleaner your file, the more attractive you are to the brokers now carrying real liability for the choice.
Evaluating Carrier Risk Profiles Through a Broker’s New Lens
A broker’s old vetting workflow took three minutes: pull SAFER, check authority, check insurance, tender the load. That floor still exists. What sits above it is new, and four data points carry most of the weight.
CSA BASIC scores come first. Seven categories, each scored on a 0-100 percentile, with alert thresholds that vary by category and carrier size. Vehicle Maintenance and Unsafe Driving are the two BASICs that overweight citations typically land in.
Safety rating comes next. Satisfactory, Conditional, or Unsatisfactory. A conditional rating used to be mostly an insurance problem. After Montgomery it is a load-access problem too, especially for high-value, hazmat, reefer, and oversized freight that brokers will steer toward satisfactory-rated carriers first.
Out-of-service percentage is the third. CVSA 2025 Roadcheck inspected 56,178 commercial vehicles and placed 22.6 percent of them out of service. A fleet tracking above that national average stands out on any scorecard a broker pulls.
Overweight citation history is the fourth, and the one most directly in your control. FMCSA data indicates more than 40 percent of commercial drivers receive an overloading citation at some point. One ticket is statistical noise. Three in eighteen months is a pattern, and patterns show up in the SMS where brokers can read them.
The dollar figures behind those data points are not small. The federal out-of-service fine ceiling is $19,277 per occurrence. Reported overweight fines in Oregon have reached $20,000 in extreme cases, and California’s $175 base fine compounds to roughly $753 with state and county assessments at four to five thousand pounds over. Counting the fine, the CSA points, the insurance impact, and the downtime, the full cost of a single overweight ticket usually runs three to five times the ticket itself.
Where on-board scales fit in the documented-compliance picture
A fleet already running on-board scales like iWeigh® has the ability to document axle weight and gross weight on every load allowing brokers view proof that the carrier checks weight before the truck rolls.
An on-board scale does not make a fleet Montgomery-proof by itself. What it does is close the one piece of the broker’s checklist that most carriers cannot produce on demand, and it does so automatically, on every load.
The post-Montgomery freight market rewards the carriers who already run a tight shop and can prove it. If you want a hand sizing up where on-board weight data fits in your operation, our fleet specialists can walk through your spec, your retrofit options, and your current vetting paper trail.