Your Carrier File Looks Fine. Here's What a Plaintiff's Lawyer Sees That You Don't.

An attorney I talked to after Montgomery put it a way that stuck with me: "We don't need to prove you hired a bad carrier. We need to prove you can't prove you hired a good one."

That's the frame. And once you understand it, you see carrier files differently.

I've been in this business long enough to have reviewed my own carrier files from the outside — meaning, I've looked at what I had on carriers I'd moved loads with and asked: if I were a plaintiff's lawyer, what would I do with this? The answer wasn't reassuring. Not because I had bad documentation. Because the documentation I had answered the wrong questions. It showed the carrier existed, had insurance, had authority. It said nothing about why I trusted them, when I decided to trust them, whether that trust was still warranted on the day the load moved, or who at my company made that call.

Those are the four questions that win and lose trucking cases post-Montgomery. And most broker files are silent on all four.

The subpoena arrives. What does it actually ask for?

The standard discovery request in a negligent carrier selection case doesn't ask for "your carrier file." It asks for specific categories of documents. Based on what I've seen and heard from people who've been through it, the list typically looks something like this:

• All documents related to the selection of the carrier for the load at issue
• All documents related to the carrier's qualification or approval by the broker
• All internal policies, procedures, or guidelines related to carrier selection or vetting
• All records of safety data reviewed prior to selection
• All communications with the carrier regarding the load, including pre-load verification steps
• All logs, reports, or records from any carrier monitoring service
• All training materials provided to employees regarding carrier selection

Each one of those requests is looking for a specific thing. And in most broker files, several of those categories produce nothing.

What "nothing" looks like in a deposition

I want to be concrete about what missing documentation looks like when a plaintiff's attorney has you in a chair.

The broker in this scenario — call them Meridian Freight Services, MC-1389042 — had moved thirty-something loads with a carrier before the accident. They had a carrier packet. They had COIs on file. They had a SAFER printout from two years prior when they first onboarded the carrier.

Question 1: How did Meridian Freight select this carrier for this specific load?

Meridian's answer: we had them on our approved list.

Follow-up: How did they get on the approved list?

Answer: we vetted them when we onboarded them.

Follow-up: Who at Meridian vetted them?

Answer: I'd have to check.

Follow-up: When was the onboarding screen run?

Answer: ...two years ago, based on the date on this document.

Follow-up: Did anyone run any verification between the onboarding date and the date of the load?

Answer: I don't have a record of that.

That's the gap. Two years between the approval and the load, and nothing in between. The SAFER data from onboarding showed the carrier as clean. The SAFER data on the day of the load — which nobody pulled — would have shown a Crash Indicator BASIC percentile that had climbed into the high seventies. Two years of deteriorating safety performance. The file was silent on all of it.

Question 2: What criteria did Meridian use to approve this carrier?

Answer: we look at their SAFER data, their insurance, their authority.

Follow-up: Is that process written down anywhere?

Answer: not formally.

Follow-up: So there's no written policy that says "a carrier must meet these standards to be approved"?

Answer: not in that format.

Follow-up: If there's no written policy, how do I know those standards were actually applied?

That's where it ends. Not with a knockout punch — with a question that has no answer. Which is worse.

The document you didn't know you needed to create

49 CFR Part 371 tells you what records you're required to keep as a broker. Section 371.3 covers the specifics: you need to retain records relating to each shipment — the name of the shipper and the carrier, the terms of any compensation arrangement, the carrier's MC number. It's a three-year retention requirement. Nothing in Part 371 requires you to document your vetting process, your approval criteria, or when you ran a safety check.

That's not a trap. The regulation says what it says. But plaintiff attorneys aren't working from the regulation when they ask for documents. They're working from what a reasonable, prudent professional would have done before selecting a carrier. And what a reasonable professional would have done is leave a record.

There's a concept in negligence law called res ipsa loquitur — "the thing speaks for itself." It comes up in trucking cases when an accident's cause is obvious from the circumstances. But there's a documentary version of it that I think about more than the formal doctrine. When your carrier file doesn't contain a record of how you vetted the carrier, the file itself speaks — just not in your favor.

The four absences that create liability

Based on everything I've read since Montgomery came down on May 14, these are the specific documentation gaps that matter most:

1. No record of how the carrier was found.

If the carrier came from a load board, that's fine. But can you produce documentation showing that? Can you show what filter criteria you used, what options you looked at, why you chose this carrier over others? If the answer is "I called them and they answered," that's going to be a long deposition.

2. No timestamp tying the safety verification to the load.

This is the one that kills people. A COI from eight months ago and a SAFER printout from onboarding don't prove anything about the carrier's status on the day the load moved. A plaintiff's attorney will pull the carrier's BASIC percentile history and show the jury the difference between what the carrier looked like when you approved them and what they looked like the day the trailer pulled out of your shipper's dock. You need a dated record that shows what you checked and when.

3. No record of who approved the carrier and against what standard.

"We approved them" is not documentation. Who approved them? What did that person check? What threshold did the carrier have to meet to pass? If your answer to "what's your approval standard" is "we know it when we see it," you are exposed.

4. No re-verification or monitoring record.

A carrier approved two years ago was a different carrier two years ago. Insurance changes. Scores change. Equipment ages. Drivers turn over. If you have no record of any check between the approval date and the load date, there's nothing in your file to rebut the claim that you just assumed the carrier was still okay.

What a carrier selection record actually does

This is why I built DOTScreener with what we call the Carrier Selection Record. Every time you screen a carrier on the platform, it generates a timestamped record — a snapshot of the SAFER data, the BASIC scores, the insurance status, and the safety rating at the moment of the screen. It's attached to that carrier in your account. It answers questions 1, 2, 3, and 4 above.

Continuous Monitoring takes it further: when something material changes on a carrier you've previously screened — a new inspection, an expiring insurance certificate, a BASIC crossing a threshold — DOTScreener re-files a fresh, dated Carrier Selection Record. The re-filing is automatic. You get notified. The record shows both what changed and when DOTScreener caught it.

That's not a legal defense, and I'm not a lawyer. But it's the closest thing to a documented vetting process that I know how to produce. The timestamp is real. The data in it is what FMCSA showed on that date. The approval event is logged. If someone asks "what did you check and when," the answer comes from a record, not from memory.

How I document this

When I'm building a carrier file for a specific load, here's what goes in it:

• The Carrier Selection Record from DOTScreener, timestamped within 24 hours of tender
• The L&I insurance verification from FMCSA (not just the ACORD 25 — the actual L&I filing page, dated)
• A note on how the carrier was sourced: from Find Carrier, from our approved list, from a broker colleague recommendation — whoever found them and why
• The approval event record showing who at our company approved the carrier and when
• For any carrier we haven't moved with in the last 90 days, a fresh screen before we tender — no exceptions

That's six things. None of them take more than ten minutes to produce. All of them answer the questions a plaintiff's attorney will ask if something goes wrong. Most of them are in DOTScreener automatically. The last two require a human decision, which is appropriate — someone has to actually make the call.

If you look at your carrier file right now and it doesn't contain all six of those things, you have documentation gaps. That doesn't mean you'll get sued. It means that if you do, you'll be explaining absences instead of pointing to records.

Plaintiff attorneys know the difference. They've been practicing it since May.

The hard truth

The broker I described earlier — Meridian, MC-1389042, the two-year-old screen — isn't unusual. It's the norm. Most brokers have carrier files that show a carrier was once vetted, with no record of anything after that. The carrier existed, had insurance, had authority. Check, check, check. What the file doesn't say is that anyone was paying attention.

That's the liability. Not the accident. Not even the carrier. The absence of proof that anyone was watching.

Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II didn't create new liability. It removed the preemption defense that let brokers say "state-law claims don't apply to us." Now that the defense is gone, every state-court plaintiff's attorney in the country is looking at broker files the same way. And what they're finding — too often — is a COI from onboarding and a SAFER printout from two years ago.

If that's what your file looks like, you have work to do. Not because I say so. Because someone on the other side of a future litigation table will eventually say so, and at that point you'd rather have documentation than regret.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com