The Warranty Clauses in Your Carrier Agreement Are a Checklist You Made for Yourself

A broker called me last fall after she got named in a lawsuit. Driver for one of her regular carriers blew a stop sign. One fatality. She told me she had a solid carrier agreement — "it says they have to maintain insurance and comply with all the FMCSA regs."

I asked what she'd done to verify those things before she tendered the load.

She said: "That's the carrier's responsibility. I have their certificate of insurance on file."

That's when I told her: "Their attorney just handed your attorney a list of everything you said you'd checked. Now your attorney has to explain why there's no evidence you actually checked any of it."

What You Put in Writing When You Signed That Template

Pull apart a standard broker-carrier agreement — TIA template, something a colleague sent over in 2019, whatever your TMS auto-generates — and you'll find language roughly like this:

"Carrier represents and warrants that: (a) it holds valid operating authority issued by the FMCSA and such authority is in good standing; (b) it maintains public liability and cargo insurance in the amounts required by applicable law and as specified in this Agreement; (c) all drivers operating under this Agreement are properly licensed, meet applicable driver qualification standards under 49 CFR Part 391, and are not disqualified under FMCSA regulations; (d) Carrier shall comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations."

That's what the carrier promised. Most brokers read it as the carrier's obligation and forget about it. Here's the thing: those clauses are also a list of things you agreed to treat as material. You wrote them in there. You asked the carrier to sign them. And whether you verified them — or whether you made it a policy to never check — is exactly what comes out in discovery.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II (U.S. Supreme Court, May 2026) blew up the FAAAA preemption defense that used to shield brokers from state-court negligent selection claims. Brokers can now be sued in state court under whatever negligent selection standard the plaintiff's jurisdiction recognizes. The standard of care becomes the question. And your carrier agreement just described it.

The Insurance Clause

Most carrier agreements specify a minimum BIPD figure — sometimes $750K (the federal minimum under 49 CFR § 387.9 for property carriers), often $1M if the broker upgraded the template. Whatever you wrote in there is now your stated expectation.

Here's what most brokers use to verify insurance: an ACORD 25 certificate, collected at carrier onboarding. Done.

A certificate of insurance shows you the policy in effect as of the date the certificate was generated. It says nothing about what happened between that date and the date you tendered the load. Policies get cancelled for nonpayment. They get downgraded. Insurers issue cancellation notices under BMC-91X, and there's sometimes a 30-day window before the cancellation hits the FMCSA Licensing & Insurance database.

49 CFR § 387.307(b) requires carriers to maintain evidence of financial responsibility on file with FMCSA. That's the BMC-91. It's public. It's on FMCSA's Licensing & Insurance portal. When you pull a carrier's L&I history, you see every insurance filing event — active coverages, endorsements, cancellations. If a policy was cancelled and reinstated, it shows up. If a carrier has been burning through insurers every eight months, it shows up.

Your carrier agreement says you expect them to maintain coverage. The L&I database is how you'd know if they aren't. If you collected a certificate once at onboarding and never pulled the L&I history again, you had the means to verify your own clause and chose not to use it.

The Driver Qualification Clause

The "all drivers are properly licensed and qualified under 49 CFR Part 391" warranty is pointing at a specific federal regulation. Part 391 sets out what it takes to be a qualified commercial driver: CDL validity for the vehicle type, current medical examiner's certificate under § 391.41, driving record review under § 391.23, and the carrier's own annual MVR review requirement under § 391.25.

Under § 391.25(c), carriers are required to review each driver's driving record at least once every 12 months. That's not something that happens at hire and then gets filed away. That's an ongoing obligation.

When a carrier's driver causes a fatal accident two years after hire with a driving record that would have disqualified them on annual review — if the carrier had done one — the warranty clause in your agreement becomes a marker for what you expected to be true. You said you expected drivers to be qualified under Part 391. Part 391.25 is part of Part 391. If you never verified that this carrier actually runs annual MVR reviews, you have no basis for believing the warranty you required them to sign is accurate.

That's not a technicality. A jury can understand it.

The "Comply With All Regulations" Clause

The blanket regulatory compliance representation sounds comprehensive. In practice, it's the clause most brokers treat as covering everything so they don't have to think about any of it. That reading is backwards.

A compliance clause establishes what you expected the carrier to do. It doesn't establish that you took any steps to assess whether they were doing it. Expecting compliance and verifying compliance are two different things. Your carrier agreement reflects the first. Your carrier file has to reflect the second.

Take MC-1847291 / DOT-3412087 as an example — a 26-month-old carrier, Property authority, 12 power units. If that carrier is at the 87th percentile on Unsafe Driving and the 79th percentile on Hours of Service Compliance, and you approved them anyway with no note in the file about either score, your compliance warranty just described a set of regulations they were measurably not meeting. And you have no record that you looked.

I'm not saying a high BASIC score is an automatic disqualifier. There are loads I've tendered to carriers with elevated BASIC scores and documented exactly why — short authority age inflating percentiles, small sample size, specific violation codes that weren't relevant to the freight type. That documentation is the difference between a deliberate decision and a gap.

Why Softening the Language Is Not the Answer

A few brokers I know have switched to templates with softer language. "Material compliance" instead of "full compliance." "Commercially reasonable efforts to maintain" instead of "shall maintain." The theory is that vaguer commitments are harder to hold against you.

I don't buy it. Juries aren't parsing warranty language at that level of precision. What they're evaluating is whether the broker had a process or was just collecting loads without thinking about who was hauling them. A contract that looks like you were deliberately hedging your obligations reads worse, not better.

The real fix is making your practice match what your contract already says you expect. That's it.

One Regulation That Shows Up in Discovery

49 CFR § 390.13: "No person shall aid, abet, encourage, or require a motor carrier or its employees to violate the rules of this chapter."

This isn't the primary negligent selection theory post-Montgomery — that's state tort law. But § 390.13 establishes that brokers, as regulated persons in the FMCSA system, carry obligations about the carriers they work with. Plaintiffs cite it to establish that the federal regulatory framework contemplated broker responsibility for carrier compliance, not just carrier self-certification.

If your carrier agreement required the carrier to comply with FMCSA regulations, and you consistently selected carriers with documented compliance issues, § 390.13 is the hook for showing your vetting process (or the absence of one) wasn't consistent with your obligations as a licensed broker.

How I Document This

After Montgomery forced a serious look at carrier file depth, here's what I keep in each carrier file:

1. Signed carrier agreement with version date. Version matters — if you've updated your template since onboarding, I want to know which terms were in place at the time of each load.

2. SAFER snapshot dated within 30 days of approval (and renewed every 90 days for active carriers). Operating status, authority type confirmation, inspection OOS rates, BASIC flag summary.

3. FMCSA L&I insurance history pull — not just the ACORD 25. Dated printout showing active coverage, insurer name matching the certificate, no recent cancellation events.

4. BASIC score summary with a brief note on anything elevated. If a carrier has a Crash Indicator BASIC above 65th percentile, I want a note on why I tendered anyway — or confirmation that the sample size was too small to be meaningful.

5. Authority type confirmed against freight type. A carrier with Property authority can't haul household goods. Takes two minutes to verify on SAFER and protects against a scope-of-authority argument.

The note on item 4 is what separates a file that shows a real process from one that looks like you filled out a form. If I see a yellow flag and make a reasoned judgment to proceed anyway, that judgment should be readable in the file. It shows I looked. That matters.

Your carrier agreement already describes your standard of care. The question is whether your carrier file backs it up.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com