What Your Carrier File Looks Like From the Other Side of the Table

Nobody who has been deposed over a carrier selection decision ever told me the experience changed how they build freight after that. They said it changed how they build carrier files.

That difference matters. After Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II came down in May, I started asking brokers who'd been through negligent-selection litigation — some successfully defended, some not — how opposing counsel actually worked through their documentation. What I heard was consistent enough to be useful.

Here's roughly what plaintiff's attorneys do with your carrier file once they get it in discovery, and what it means for what you keep and how you keep it.

They Start at the Back

Most carrier files are built chronologically. COI request comes in, MC pull happens, insurance verifies, carrier agreement gets signed, a few notes from the T-call, load gets covered. The plaintiff's attorney starts at the back. They want to know what the most recent document in the file is and when it was created.

If the last thing in your file is a COI with a certificate date from eighteen months before the load, that's interesting to them. It raises the question of what changed between then and the day of the crash. New driver? New equipment? Insurance lapse and reinstatement? Your file doesn't answer those questions because nobody looked.

That gap — months or years of no activity, then a load — is the opening. "When did you last evaluate this carrier's safety record before tendering this load?" is a clean deposition question, and a file that stops eighteen months ago doesn't have a clean answer.

The Insurance History, Not the Certificate

This one surprises brokers. They produce an ACORD 25 from a carrier with a clean certificate date and current policy numbers. The plaintiff's attorney sets it aside and pulls the FMCSA insurance filing history from the L&I database instead.

The L&I filing history shows every insurance filing a carrier has made going back years — every BMC-91 or BMC-91X, every lapse, every reinstatement. A carrier that shows a clean COI today but had its coverage lapse for nine days in February and again for three weeks in September has a pattern. That pattern doesn't appear on the certificate. It's in the filing history.

The deposition question isn't "was the carrier insured on the day of the load." That's almost always yes — a carrier with lapsed insurance gets flagged by FMCSA and typically comes back into compliance to keep running. The question is: did you know about the lapses? Did that pattern affect your selection decision?

If you only looked at the current certificate, you didn't know about the lapses. Which means you can't say the pattern mattered to you, because you never saw it. That's a problem.

The FMCSA L&I system gives you the complete filing history. That's what belongs in the file — not just current status. Any carrier screening that only shows you "active" or "inactive" is leaving you blind to the history that shows up in discovery.

The Timestamp Problem

If your file has a SAFER snapshot, the plaintiff's attorney wants to know when you pulled it. Not the snapshot date embedded in the report — the date and time you actually ran the query.

This matters because FMCSA enforcement actions, authority revocations, and out-of-service orders happen in real time, every day. An OOS order issued at 11 AM isn't visible in a SAFER snapshot you ran at 8 AM. Under 49 CFR § 390.3, carriers are required to operate in compliance with the FMCSRs at all times — but compliance status changes, and your documentation only captures the moment you looked.

For most carrier files I've seen described: one printed SAFER snapshot, no timestamp in the filename, no metadata showing when it ran. The carrier agreement might be dated. The COI might be dated. The SAFER pull is just there — could have been yesterday, could have been two years ago.

That's the opening for "what did you actually know, and when did you know it."

A timestamped Carrier Selection Record — one where the date and time of each data query is embedded in the document by the system, not typed in by you — closes that question. Not fully, but substantially. When the record shows you pulled authority, BASIC scores, OOS rates, and insurance status at 9:47 AM on the day the load was tendered, that's a different answer than "sometime before we covered it."

What's Missing

Opposing counsel isn't just reading what you produced. They're cataloging what's absent.

No carrier agreement? That's a problem under 49 CFR Part 371.3, which requires brokers to maintain records of each transaction — including the name of the carrier and the agreed-upon rate — for three years. A missing carrier agreement suggests you either didn't get one or you lost it. Neither is a good answer under oath.

No documentation of who signed it? A signature from dispatch@[somecorp].com on a DocuSign link you emailed to a general inbox means you don't know if the person who signed had authority to bind the carrier. If the carrier later disputes the terms of the agreement — or if the driver who ran the load wasn't actually employed by the entity that signed — you're holding a document that may not be enforceable. And you can't explain who you were dealing with.

No note on an elevated BASIC? This comes up specifically when crashes involve vehicle condition or driver behavior. If the carrier's Unsafe Driving BASIC was in the 90th percentile and your file doesn't mention it, the question becomes: did you see it and decide it didn't matter, or did you not see it at all? Both are defensible in theory. Neither is defensible without documentation. "I ran the screen and the Unsafe Driving BASIC was 94th percentile; I called their safety director, who explained the three incidents and the corrective action taken, and made the selection decision on that basis" is a different statement than silence.

No T-call notes? The call may have happened. But absence of notes doesn't prove the call happened — it just proves you didn't document it. A plaintiff's attorney reading a file without any call notes will ask, in deposition, whether the call happened at all.

The Rating and the BASIC Scores

I put this last not because it's least important, but because in every account I've heard from brokers who've been through discovery, the safety rating and BASIC scores are the easiest part to defend if your file handles them correctly.

A carrier with a Satisfactory rating, a Crash Indicator BASIC in the 30th percentile, and a clean OOS rate is a defensible selection. If something went wrong on that load, you have a file that shows you looked at the right things and the data supported the pick.

The problem is when the scores are elevated and the file is silent about them. A Crash Indicator BASIC in the 85th percentile isn't automatically disqualifying — there are legitimate reasons to work with carriers whose scores are elevated, particularly in tight capacity markets — but the file needs to show you knew about it and reasoned through it. What did the inspection history look like? Did you call? What did they say? Did you add any additional vetting steps for this load?

Silence in the file reads as not knowing, or knowing and not caring enough to write it down. Courts have to work with what's in the record.

The Question Under Everything

Every document in your carrier file is answering a question that opposing counsel will eventually ask. The questions are consistent: How did you find this carrier? What did you check? When did you check it? Who checked it? What did the data show at that moment? What did you do with what you found?

A file that can answer all of those questions — with specific dates, specific data points, and specific decisions — is a fundamentally different document than one that can't. Not a guarantee of anything, but a different document.

What I've noticed building carrier files for the last few years is that the instinct is to build them forward — collect the documents as they arrive, store them, move on. The file that holds up in discovery is built like it's going to be read backwards by someone who doesn't believe you.

How I Document This

For every load, including carriers I've used before:

Pull a fresh Carrier Selection Record at load time. The timestamp should be system-generated — embedded by the platform at query time, not typed by hand. That timestamp is what proves when you looked.

Pull the FMCSA L&I insurance filing history, not just current status. If there are lapses in the last 24 months, they go in the notes. Not to disqualify the carrier automatically, but because if they're asked about it in discovery and your file shows you knew, you're in a better position than if it shows you didn't.

If any BASIC score is elevated — say, above the 75th percentile in any category — add a note documenting what the score was, what you did with the information, and what the carrier said if you called. Thirty seconds of typing.

Keep T-call notes. Date and time. Name and title of the carrier contact if you get it. Brief summary. These don't have to be formatted documents; a timestamped note in the carrier file works.

Carrier agreement through a system that captures signatory identity — verified, not just an email address. That means something if the agreement is ever challenged.

If the carrier was approved six months ago and nothing triggered a re-review, run a new CSR before the load. Continuous monitoring catches material changes in authority and insurance status automatically, but the monitoring only tells you something changed — the documented re-pull before the load is still yours to do.

None of this is a guarantee. A serious crash draws serious scrutiny, and a good plaintiff's attorney can find an angle in almost any file. But the file that can answer the questions — specifically, with timestamps, with data — is not the same as the one that can't.

That's the file worth building.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com