05/22/2026
There is, post a considerably terrible set of reporting from 60 minutes, now a Supreme Court ruling moving through the news cycle right now, Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, which decided unanimously that freight brokers can be sued for negligently selecting the carriers who actually move the freight. Half the commentary I've read this week treats it like the moment American freight finally got dragged into adulthood. The other half treats it like a regulatory earthquake.
I’m operating in the weeds of this business every day! Let me tell you what it actually is.
It's nothing.
Not "I disagree with the ruling" nothing. Not "the impact will be smaller than predicted" nothing. I mean operationally, structurally, in the actual day-to-day reality of how loads get tendered to trucks in this country, this ruling changes approximately ****-all. And the fact that so many smart people are confidently writing the opposite is, to me, the more interesting story than the ruling itself.
This is a recurring problem in public commentary about freight. The industry is large, economically critical, and almost entirely opaque to people who don't work inside it. So when something legible happens, like a Supreme Court decision, an entire ecosystem of commentators, regulators, journalists, and LinkedIn thought leaders rush in to explain an industry they fundamentally do not understand. They explain it confidently. They explain it to other people who also don't understand it. And then everyone walks away with a model of freight brokerage that bears no resemblance to how freight brokerage actually works.
Let me try to fix some of that.
The core claim in the commentary is that brokers have, until now, been free to select carriers carelessly because no legal framework forced them to be careful. That claim is so disconnected from operational reality that it makes it difficult to know where to begin the educational conversation. There are entire SaaS companies dedicated to carrier compliance.
Every legitimate brokerage in this country operates inside a multi-layered compliance system that filters carriers before a broker ever touches them. FMCSA authority status, active insurance certificates, safety ratings, CSA scores, out-of-service rates, all pulled and verified through platforms like RMIS, Highway, Carrier 411, SaferWatch. If a carrier falls below threshold, the system literally will not let the broker tender a load to them. The button is grayed out. You can want to use that carrier. The software says no.
That's the first filter, and it's already tighter than most of the commentary realizes.
But here's the part nobody outside the industry knows, and it's the part that actually matters: every decent broker goes a step beyond that. The pool we're allowed to choose from is already filtered, but within that pool, we still vet. We pull more recent inspection reports. We check carrier reviews. We look at on-time history if we've worked with them before. We call references. We notice if a carrier suddenly has new authority and no track record. We notice if the dispatcher sounds shady on the phone. We notice when a rate gets accepted too fast on a lane that shouldn't move that cheap, which is one of the oldest signs of double brokering in the business.
None of that is required by any law. None of it was required before Montgomery and none of it is required now. We do it because the alternative is losing customers, losing money, losing insurance, and losing the business we built. The incentive structure already produces the behavior the Court thinks it's compelling.
So what is the ruling actually doing? It is adding a new litigation lane on top of a market that was already disciplining this behavior through commercial consequences. That's it. The carriers who are bad enough to trigger a successful negligent selection suit were already going to be filtered out by the compliance systems, screened out by the broker's own due diligence, or carried into a claim that their broker's insurance would refuse to defend. AKA I wouldn’t be able to give them the load… you know the fist question I ask ANY carrier? “MC # please” why? Because I check to make sure they filter in my system before going into an ounce of detail about what I’moving.
The set of brokers who will be successfully sued under Montgomery is almost identical to the set of brokers who were already going to get washed out of the industry. The scammer, come-and-go’rs… The ruling is solving a problem the market had already solved.
The wildest part of the decision, which almost nobody is talking about, is Kavanaugh's concurrence. He and Alito joined the majority but quietly added that federal law doesn't actually require brokers to do any of this vetting, and that carriers are better positioned to monitor their own trucks and drivers anyway. A Supreme Court Justice, in writing, admitting that the Court just dumped tort liability on the party with the least operational control over the asset, while acknowledging that no federal law requires what they just made the brokers liable for.
Read that sentence twice. Nobody in the commentariat seems to have read it once.
The real risk areas in freight, the places where bad actors actually live, are not at established brokerages with mature compliance. They live in the seams: unregulated dispatch services, double brokering schemes, identity-layered carriers using legitimate MC numbers as cover, hybrid broker-forwarder structures with ambiguous liability chains. These are the actual edges of the system, and they are mostly not reachable through negligent selection doctrine. Montgomery aims at the part of the industry that was already disciplined and largely ignores the part that wasn't.
So when I watch this conversation unfold, what I'm actually watching is a familiar pattern. Outsiders attempting to regulate, comment on, or thought-lead an industry whose operational reality they have not done the work to understand. They mistake the absence of a recent statute for the absence of accountability. They mistake an opaque industry for an unregulated one. They mistake their own ignorance of the system for evidence that the system is broken.
This is not a freight problem. It happens to every complex industry the moment something legible enough for the public to grab onto leaks out. But freight is where I work, so freight is where I notice it.
The Court did not introduce due diligence to this industry. Brokers, our customers, our carriers, our insurance markets, and our compliance systems were already doing it. The ruling will raise premiums, harden contracts, push smaller brokerages out, generate billable hours for plaintiffs' attorneys, and ultimately add cost that gets absorbed by shippers and consumers. Not a single load run will have been made safer by it.
People need to understand our industry at a far better level than our Supreme Court just demonstrated.
That sentence isn't an attack. It's a request. Spend more time understanding the system before announcing what it needs.
The law, as usual, arrived after the work was already done.
