A litigation-aware read of where carrier-selection liability now sits — and the specific record a broker or insurer needs to answer for a decision after the fact.
Negligent-selection theory is not new. What changed is federal preemption. On May 14, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that a broker's duty to use reasonable care in selecting a carrier falls within the FAAAA's safety exception — so the preemption defense brokers relied on for more than a decade no longer applies in any state. A broker who tenders freight to an unfit carrier can now be treated as a proximate cause of what follows, in front of a jury, in all fifty states.
The practical shift is evidentiary. It is no longer enough to have had a process. The question in the room is whether you can produce the decision: what you knew at the moment of tender, what the signals were, who weighed them, and what they concluded. An unproduceable process reads, to a jury, as no process at all.
A defensible selection today rests on four load-bearing elements. Miss any one and the record has a hole a plaintiff's expert will find. Together they describe a reasonable process — carried out by a named person, at the moment of tender, and maintained afterward.
The legal argument is only as good as the artifact behind it. For each element of the standard, this is the concrete evidence GroundCheck produces.
The phoenix pattern — a revoked authority reappearing under a new MC — is named, evidenced by the shared identifiers that triggered it, and attached to the file.
Every point is traceable to a factor and its evidence. The conclusion and the reasoning are both preserved — so the assessment survives cross-examination.
Who decided, when, and on what basis — including the override — under a cryptographic seal. Material changes after tender append to the same file.
One record, redacted for filing, that answers every element of the standard in the order a court asks for them.
Before the next tender — and before the next claim. Share this brief with your legal and underwriting teams, or discuss your exposure with ours.
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