The Signed Carrier Agreement You Can't Actually Prove

A freight broker gets joined as a defendant in a crash lawsuit. Standard stuff in 2026 after Montgomery. Plaintiff's attorney issues discovery: produce all carrier onboarding documents, carrier agreements, and any communications with MC-1247893 / DOT-3891044 prior to tendering the load.

The broker produces a signed carrier agreement. It's a three-page PDF. It has a signature at the bottom. The email thread shows it came back within two hours of being sent. Looks clean.

Deposition, four months later. Plaintiff's attorney holds up the agreement. "Who is Daniel Kowalczyk?" The broker says that's the person who signed the carrier agreement on behalf of the carrier. "What's his title?" The broker doesn't know. "Is he an officer of Midwest Speed Freight LLC?" The broker doesn't know. "Did you take any steps to verify that Daniel Kowalczyk was authorized to enter this agreement on behalf of the motor carrier?" The broker says they sent the agreement and got it back.

That's the moment the broker realizes they have a signed document they can't actually explain.

Why a Signature Isn't the Same as a Contract

A carrier agreement does specific legal work. It's supposed to establish the carrier's warranty of regulatory compliance — that they'll operate within the FMCSRs, maintain required insurance, use qualified drivers. It sets liability allocation. It's the paper trail that says: before I gave this carrier my customer's freight, I asked them to represent their fitness.

None of that works if the person who signed the agreement wasn't authorized to bind the motor carrier.

Basic agency law: an unauthorized signature doesn't bind the company. An employee who signs a contract on behalf of a corporation without authority — express or apparent — isn't binding that corporation to anything. Which means that from a contract law standpoint, your "signed carrier agreement" may be worth nothing. You thought you had one, but you didn't.

That's worse than not having an agreement at all. If you never tried to get one, you can argue you relied on FMCSA registration and insurance verification. If you tried and got back an unauthorized signature from someone who had no power to bind the carrier, you arguably failed at the thing you set out to do.

The Discovery Pattern After Montgomery

Since Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC — the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down May 14, 2026, holding that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act does NOT preempt state-law negligent-selection claims against freight brokers — plaintiff's firms doing freight litigation have updated their playbooks. The FAAAA preemption defense that 7th and 11th Circuit courts once relied on is gone. Brokers are liable under state negligent-selection standards.

What that means in discovery is that plaintiff's attorneys are now digging into the carrier selection process with the same rigor they'd apply to any negligent-hiring case. And they know that most carrier onboarding is thin.

The interrogatories I've seen look like this:

Identify by name, title, and employer every person involved in setting up Midwest Speed Freight LLC as an approved carrier. Describe all steps you took to verify the identity of the person who executed your carrier agreement. Describe all steps you took to confirm that person's authority to bind the motor carrier to the obligations stated in the agreement. Produce all records, communications, and logs relating to that verification.

Most brokers can answer the first question. Almost none can answer the second and third.

The Double-Broker Version of This Problem

The scenario I described above — a legitimate carrier, an unauthorized signatory — is one version of the problem. The worse version is the double-broker.

A double-broker runs your carrier packet using real FMCSA data for an actual MC. They fill in MC-1247893's authority number, operating address, and insurance information. They sign your carrier agreement as "dispatch" or make up a name and a title. They send back a COI they pulled from a publicly available certificate that looks right. Everything checks out on the surface.

The actual MC-1247893 never knew you existed. The person who signed your carrier agreement had no affiliation with that entity whatsoever. The truck that showed up was operated by someone entirely different.

In that scenario, your signed carrier agreement doesn't bind anyone who had custody of the freight. And when plaintiff's attorney asks who Daniel Kowalczyk is, you're answering "we don't know and we never found out."

This isn't a hypothetical edge case. Double-brokering is common, the schemes are sophisticated, and the carrier onboarding moment is exactly where the fraud happens. They move through your packet before you know anything went wrong.

What 49 CFR § 390.3 Puts on This

49 CFR § 390.3(e) makes clear that motor carriers are responsible for compliance with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, and that motor carriers must ensure their employees and agents comply as well. The framework assumes there's an identifiable legal entity — a motor carrier — that is accountable for every truck operating under its authority.

Your carrier agreement is supposed to be the link between you and that accountable entity. The problem is that the regulations set up carrier accountability but don't tell you how to verify you're actually contracting with the right people. That's on you.

And "I sent a PDF to the email address that was in the load confirmation" isn't a verification process. It's hoping for the best. That might have been acceptable in a world where FAAAA preemption blocked negligent-selection claims. It isn't acceptable post-Montgomery.

Reasonable diligence under a negligent-selection standard requires you to take steps that would actually tell you something. A dispatch email address connected to a free Gmail account doesn't tell you anything about who you're dealing with.

The Reefer Scenario That Ends Badly

Here's how this plays out in the real world. A broker in Wisconsin tenders a 42,000-pound load of pharma-grade frozen biologics — call it $680,000 insured value — to what they believe is MC-1247893, a carrier with a two-year history on SAFER and a clean Unsafe Driving BASIC. Carrier agreement on file, signed two weeks prior.

Except it wasn't MC-1247893. It was a dispatcher from a Facebook freight group who ran the onboarding packet using MC-1247893's real data, pocketed the advance, and handed the load to an unlicensed operation. The reefer trailer broke down. The load spoiled. The shipper's insurer covered it and came after the broker.

Discovery goes straight to the carrier agreement. The signatory's identity. The steps taken to verify. The broker has a signed PDF and nothing else. Plaintiff's counsel calls it "a signature from no one." The case settles for significantly more than it would have if the broker had taken two extra steps at onboarding.

What Real Identity Verification Looks Like

When a carrier onboards through DOTScreener, the carrier agreement doesn't just go out as a PDF to a dispatch email. It goes through our e-sign flow, and the signatory gets a link to /verify/agreement — a real-time identity verification step tied to the signature event. Not a checkbox. Not a name typed into a field that could be anything.

The identity verification step asks the signatory to confirm who they are in a way that creates a verifiable record. That record is attached to the signed agreement in the carrier's file.

Our AI document review component then cross-references what they submitted — insurance certificates, operating information — against the FMCSA live data at the time of onboarding. If the signatory's claimed affiliation doesn't square with the FMCSA company record, it flags it. If the carrier's authority status changed between packet submission and agreement signature, it flags that too.

What comes out is a carrier onboarding record with a verified identity stamp alongside the signed agreement and a timestamp on the FMCSA data check. When plaintiff's attorney asks who signed your carrier agreement and whether they were authorized, you have an answer. Not a perfect answer — no verification is perfect — but a documented process that shows you asked the question and got a real response.

That's what reasonable diligence looks like. It's not just having the signed document. It's being able to explain how you got it and what you checked.

The Gap Most Brokers Don't Realize They Have

I've talked to brokers who are genuinely surprised by this issue. They have carrier agreements for every carrier in their network. They feel covered. The problem is they conflate having the document with having done the diligence.

A signed PDF without identity verification of the signatory is a document you collected. It isn't evidence of due diligence. The difference shows up when someone asks you to prove what you actually did and why you believed you were dealing with an authorized representative of the motor carrier.

The check you didn't do — confirming that Daniel Kowalczyk, signing on behalf of Midwest Speed Freight LLC, actually had authority to bind that entity — is the gap plaintiff's attorney finds. And once they find it, the rest of your file gets scrutinized harder.

How I Document This

For every carrier onboarded through DOTScreener, the carrier file includes:

The signed carrier agreement with the e-sign timestamp and document event record. The identity verification record for the signatory, showing the verification step was completed at the time of signing. An FMCSA authority snapshot from the time of onboarding — carrier name, MC number, operating status, active BIPD and cargo insurance, authority type — so there's a record of what we checked and when. The AI document review output showing the cross-reference between submitted documents and FMCSA data at that moment.

If you're not using DOTScreener's carrier onboarding packet, the minimum I'd do manually: before the agreement goes out, pull the carrier's FMCSA snapshot and write down the registered contact name. When the signed agreement comes back, call the carrier's FMCSA-registered phone number — not the one in the email, not the dispatch line they gave you — and ask to confirm that the person who signed has authority to enter contracts on the carrier's behalf. Log the call, log who you spoke to, put a timestamp on it. That's two minutes of work that closes a significant discovery gap.

A signed agreement is only as strong as your ability to explain how you got it and what you verified about the person who gave it to you. If you can't explain it, a court doesn't have to believe it.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com