For decades, carrier selection was a relationship decision, not a data decision. You called your contact, got a rate, and moved the load. That was the industry standard. For a lot of operations, it still is. As of today, that standard now has a potential legal consequence attached to it.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday morning in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that federal law does not preempt state negligent-hiring claims against transportation brokers and that freight brokers can be sued for negligently hiring an unsafe carrier. State common-law standards of ordinary care can now apply to carrier selection.
While brokers are the named defendants here, the underlying reasoning could potentially be applied to anyone making a carrier selection decision. Negligent hiring liability could run to any party that did the hiring, including Shippers that tender directly to carriers, operate private fleets alongside for-hire capacity, or run in-house brokerage operations face the same legal theory. Courts will likely work through the precise boundaries in the months and years ahead. But standard going forward will likely be: if you chose the carrier, you own that choice.
Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence is the most useful thing to read if you move freight for a living. Justice Kavanaugh articulates a defensible safe harbor: brokers and shippers who selected carriers on a documented basis and can demonstrate what they knew at the moment of selection will generally be able to defend negligent hiring suits. Quoting plaintiff’s counsel approvingly, Justice Kavanaugh writes that the broker “is not going to have a problem if it’s asking the hard questions of the carrier.”
Justice Kavanaugh’s observations could form the basis for a new operating standard for brokers and shippers in the post-Montgomery world.
For every shipper and LSP, it starts with four questions you need to be able to answer on demand, sometimes years after the carrier selection was made: what did you know about this carrier’s safety record, including their FMCSA rating, crash rate, on-time performance, and inspection history? What did you verify before you booked them? What did you do when conditions changed after award? And can you locate and produce relevant, time-stamped, and auditable records to support your decisions?
Here is what project44 customers should know. If you have been running carrier selection through Freight Procurement Analytics or Rating and Booking in Intelligent TMS, you have already been building that record. Every rate comparison surfaces Carrier Assure Scores alongside cost and performance data. Every booking decision was captured with a timestamp and a documented basis for selection.
For shippers and LSPs not yet running carrier selection through a documented, data-driven workflow, the path is clear. The Court did not set an impossible standard. It set a “reasonable care” one. Reasonable care means checking FMCSA safety ratings, crash rates, and inspection history before you book. Reasonable care means capturing why you selected this carrier over alternatives. Reasonable care means being able to reconstruct that decision without two weeks of archaeological work through email threads and spreadsheets.
Intelligent TMS, with Carrier Assure Scores embedded natively, makes the new operating standard the default. The audit trail is a byproduct of the workflow, not extra work.
A shipper or broker that hires a carrier, sees something go wrong, and takes no documented action, or a shipper or broker that never noticed the problem in the first place, could struggle to defend themselves against negligent-hiring claims in the post-Montgomery world. A complete, timestamped record of where the truck was, what exceptions fired, and what was done about them could well be the difference when facing allegation of negligent hiring or any other state law claims related to carrier selection.
project44’s platform creates that record automatically, on every load, from origin to delivery. The record exists because the platform was built that way. Not because someone had the foresight to write it down.
project44 was founded in 2014 because global logistics was running on infrastructure from the 1970s. EDI, phone calls, and spreadsheets. The industry was flying blind. Eleven years later, the Decision Intelligence Platform connects over 1.5 billion shipments annually across 259,000 carriers and every major mode.
Seeing the disruption coming doesn’t save your cargo. Moving the cargo does. The Court’s ruling this morning made operational excellence and legal defensibility the same problem.
The shippers and LSPs who come out of this strongest already treated carrier selection as a data and workflow problem. For everyone else, today is a good day to start.
