Montgomery Ruling Forces Freight Brokers to Rebuild Carrier Vetting Trails

A freight broker's carrier selection process may have been reasonable when the load was tendered three years ago, but without a contemporaneous record showing exactly what was reviewed, who made the decision, and how exceptions were handled, that diligence becomes nearly impossible to prove in court. The Supreme Court's 2024 decision in *Dalton v. J&L Industrial Supply* eliminated federal preemption for broker negligence claims, leaving small and mid-sized brokerages scrambling to reconstruct vetting workflows that were never designed to produce defensible documentation years after the fact.

Documentation Gaps Brokers Cannot Close Retroactively

Katie Helton, CEO of RoxStart, a compliance technology provider serving freight brokers and carriers, explained the most common documentation failures in written responses to The Supply Chainer. "The gaps we see most often are not always about whether a broker looked at the right information. Many already do some level of diligence. The harder issue is whether they can produce a clean, load-specific record years later showing exactly what was reviewed, when it was reviewed, who made the decision, what criteria were applied, and how exceptions or red flags were handled. The hardest records to reconstruct tend to be the contemporaneous decision trail such as safety and authority checks, insurance status at the time, crash or inspection history reviewed, user/dispatcher identity, timestamps, load identifier, and override notes explaining why the broker still approved the carrier."

Katie Helton, CEO, RoxStart, "The hardest records to reconstruct tend to be the contemporaneous decision trail."

The operational challenge is not that brokers skip vetting entirely, but that vetting occurs in fragmented systems across email threads, spreadsheets, third-party portals, and verbal conversations that leave no auditable trail. When litigation arrives years later, the broker may know the carrier was checked, but cannot produce the document proving it happened before the load was tendered. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, 94 percent of interstate freight carriers eligible for a safety rating in 2021 did not have one, leaving brokers to piece together diligence from incomplete data sources that may no longer be accessible.

Industry Views Remain Split on Practical Impact

Doug Grawe, General Counsel at Openforce, a compliance and contractor engagement platform, told Openforce Blog: "The message is clear: vendor and carrier vetting is not just an operational checkpoint. It is a legal risk management function. If your organization hires or engages motor carriers, independent contractor drivers, or third-party transportation providers, your selection process, documentation, insurance verification, and ongoing monitoring may now become central to your defense in the event of a claim."

Helton noted that carrier selection documentation remains the immediate pain point, but conversations are broadening. "Brokers are also concerned about workflow consistency, fraud, driver identity, vehicle verification, insurance documentation, and whether their carrier agreements clearly document required compliance obligations," she said. "RoxVault starts with the defensible carrier-selection record, but the platform roadmap is already looking at adjacent issues such as driver verification, COI capture, broker-carrier agreement tracking, API integration into existing systems, and repeatable workflows that reduce the chance that diligence is skipped or inconsistently documented."

From Informal Diligence to Enforced Workflows

The shift from informal diligence to standardized, system-enforced workflows represents a structural change in how small brokerages operate. Helton described the transition: "Smaller brokers are moving away from informal, fragmented diligence toward workflows that can be easily documented and repeated. The larger shift is not necessarily that every broker is changing who they select overnight; it is that they now need to show reasonable care in a way that can be produced later. That means standardizing vetting criteria, documenting exceptions, and preserving insurance and safety data at the time of selection, all while embedding this into the broker's TMS or dispatch workflow so it happens before the carrier can be used. For smaller brokerages, the challenge is doing that without adding a compliance department or creating another manual process for dispatchers."

Some industry observers argue the ruling's practical impact has been overstated. Grace Keegan Johnson, Transportation Attorney at Hall Estill, told Heavy Duty Trucking: "For brokers who operate across the country, this opinion does not impact them much, because they already had the risk of liability in some of the circuits. In addition, the broker would not be the one to choose the forum of a lawsuit against them, so brokers processes and procedures should already be in place to limit liability risk."

The strategic question is whether small brokerages can afford the compliance infrastructure now required to operate defensibly, or whether documentation standards effectively consolidate the industry by forcing smaller players to exit or merge into larger platforms with dedicated legal and compliance teams.