What a Plaintiff's Attorney Does First When They Open Your Carrier File

The discovery request is one page. "All documents relating to your vetting, selection, approval, and monitoring of the carrier operating the vehicle involved in this incident." Thirty days to produce everything.

I've seen brokers get that request and assume they're fine because they "did the right things." Then they sit down to actually pull the file and realize the right things got done — they just weren't written down. Or they were written down once, 18 months ago, and nothing happened after that. A plaintiff's attorney who specializes in trucking cases knows exactly where to look, and the look doesn't take long.

After the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II in May 2026 — which held that the FAAAA does not preempt state-law negligent-selection claims against freight brokers — every plaintiff's attorney with a serious trucking case is now evaluating whether to name the broker. Before that ruling, most weren't bothering because federal preemption was a viable defense in the 7th and 11th Circuits. That door is closed now. So they're digging into broker files in a way they weren't a year ago.

Here's exactly what they do.

Step one: they pull their own FMCSA data first

Before they read a single document you produced, a good plaintiff's attorney pulls the SAFER company snapshot for the carrier — as of the date of the accident. Not today's snapshot. The date-of-loss snapshot. They screenshot it, they print it, they timestamp it. That's their baseline.

Then they compare it to what you have in your file.

Think about what that comparison reveals. Say you approved MC-1247893 / DOT-3567102 in January 2025. The carrier had a clean SAFER profile: 4.2% OOS rate on 24 vehicle inspections, zero crashes on record, active authority for three years. Reasonable. You ran the screen, you saved it to the file.

The accident happened in October 2025. The plaintiff's attorney's SAFER pull shows that by September 2025, the OOS rate had climbed to 18.6% on 47 inspections and there was a crash reported in July. The carrier had taken on a lot more freight, had equipment problems, and was starting to show signs of stress in the BASIC scores.

You didn't know any of that. Why? Because you approved them in January and never looked again.

That delta — what the file showed when you approved them versus what FMCSA showed at the date of loss — is the heart of the negligent selection argument. It's not that you picked a bad carrier from the start. It's that you had the means to know the carrier had deteriorated and you didn't use it. The plaintiff's attorney will put those two documents side by side in front of a jury.

Step two: timestamps are evidence

The first thing I look at when I'm thinking about my own file defensibility isn't what documents I have. It's when each one was created.

A plaintiff's attorney does the same thing, but from the other direction. They're looking for gaps in the timeline. Here's the sequence they reconstruct:

• Date carrier was first approved
• Date of the load tender
• Date of the incident
• Dates of every vetting document in the file

If those dates cluster at the beginning — carrier setup — and there's nothing between setup and load tender, that's a problem. It means you did a point-in-time check. You approved the carrier once and just kept booking loads. In a courtroom, that looks like you treated the initial approval as a permanent license.

The FMCSR doesn't explicitly require brokers to re-verify carriers before every load. But under a negligent selection theory, a court is going to ask what a reasonably careful broker would have done given what was knowable. A 10-month-old insurance certificate on a $180,000 refrigerated load? That's a hard position to defend.

Step three: the carrier agreement

The carrier agreement is the next thing they examine — specifically what it says about who bears responsibility for what, and whether you actually verified the carrier's compliance before tendering a load.

A lot of broker-carrier agreements have standard language about the carrier confirming their authority is current and their insurance is in force. That language doesn't help you much if you didn't independently verify it. Courts treat representations in a private contract differently from a broker's independent duty of care.

49 CFR § 371.3 requires brokers to keep records of each transaction, including the name of the carrier and details of the shipment. But that's a floor, not a ceiling. A plaintiff's attorney will argue that reasonable care requires more than recordkeeping — it requires using the records you were required to keep to actually make informed decisions about carrier selection.

Step four: insurance — the L&I question

Here's where a lot of files have a structural gap that even well-organized brokers miss.

Most brokers pull a COI at carrier setup. They've got the ACORD 25 in the file, it shows $1M primary and $100K cargo, it was issued by a recognizable carrier name. Done.

The plaintiff's attorney is going to ask: did you verify that insurance was actually in force on the date of this load?

An ACORD 25 is a certificate of insurance as of the date it was issued. It's a snapshot. If the carrier's policy cancels or lapses between when that certificate was issued and when your load moved, you had no way of knowing unless you checked the FMCSA L&I database, which reflects the current filing status directly with FMCSA. The broker pulling a COI once at setup and relying on it 14 months later is not checking insurance — they're checking a record of insurance that used to exist.

The minimum financial responsibility standard under 49 CFR § 387.9 for most dry van freight is $750,000 BIPD. For hazmat or a high-value load with an inflated liability exposure, policies often specify $1M. The point isn't the coverage amount — it's whether coverage was actually active. An L&I pull directly from FMCSA, on the date of the load, tells you that. A 14-month-old COI doesn't.

Step five: the silence in the file

This is the part that matters most, and it's the part brokers least expect.

A plaintiff's attorney can work with a file that shows you did things wrong. They can't work with a file that shows you did everything right. What they love is a file with silence — documents that don't exist, timestamps that don't exist, follow-up that didn't happen.

The absence of a re-verification record isn't neutral. It's evidence that re-verification didn't occur. If you approved a carrier and you have no record of pulling their SAFER snapshot again before a load 16 months later — a load where the carrier's OOS rate had tripled — the inference the plaintiff draws is that you didn't look. And if you didn't look, you didn't know. And if you didn't know, that's what negligent selection means.

The Carrier Selection Record — what I think of as the formal write-up for why you chose a specific carrier on a specific day — is the document that makes that inference unavailable. It shows the state of the carrier's profile at the time of selection. It creates a timestamp. It proves you looked. Without it, you're relying on "we generally check these things" testimony in deposition, which is a much weaker position than a dated document showing you actually checked.

Step six: what the deposition confirms

Everything I've described is what they find in the document production. The deposition is where they confirm it.

The questions are straightforward: Who at your company approved this carrier? When? What did they check? How do you know? Can you show me the document? Where did you get that information? When was the last time you verified this before this load? Who verified it?

If the answers are "our process is to check these things" without a document trail, the plaintiff's attorney has what they need. If every answer points to a timestamped, sourced document, the story changes.

How I document this

For every carrier I book a load with, I want five things timestamped in the carrier file at or near the time of load tender:

1. FMCSA SAFER snapshot — pulled from source, dated, showing authority status, OOS rate, crash history, and rating.

2. L&I insurance verification — not the COI. A confirmation from the FMCSA database that the policy is currently on file and active.

3. BASIC alert check — specifically whether Unsafe Driving or Crash Indicator scores have moved materially since the last review.

4. Carrier selection note — a sentence or two: why this carrier, what I looked at, any flags and how I addressed them.

5. Carrier agreement on file — current, signed version, not an unsigned template.

The selection note is the one most brokers skip. It's also the one that does the most work in deposition. It shows judgment, not just process.

DOTScreener's Carrier Selection Record captures most of this automatically — SAFER data, BASIC scores, insurance status, and a timestamped record of the pull date — and lets you add context notes before filing it. That's not an ad; that's what I built it to do because I'd seen too many brokers get caught with good intentions and a file that couldn't prove them.

The broader point

Montgomery didn't create negligent selection liability. It removed the federal preemption shield that let brokers in some circuits avoid defending those claims in state court. The underlying duty of care — to select carriers with reasonable diligence and to monitor that diligence over time — existed before the ruling and exists after it.

What changed is the stakes. More plaintiffs' attorneys are willing to name brokers because the preemption defense is gone. More state courts will hear those cases. That means the quality of your carrier file is no longer just a best practice. It's a litigation exposure question.

The brokers who are going to do fine are the ones with files that tell a coherent story: I looked at this carrier on this date, here's what I found, here's why I selected them, and here's that I kept watching. The brokers who are going to struggle are the ones who did reasonable things but can't prove it.

A file that exists in your head doesn't survive discovery.

How I document this

Before every load tender with a carrier I haven't used in the last 60 days, I pull a fresh SAFER snapshot, check L&I insurance status directly, and log both with a timestamp in the carrier file. If I see anything materially different from the last time I looked — OOS rate up, inspection count down, BASIC alert flagged — I note it, write a brief justification for proceeding or not, and save that as part of the selection record. That note takes 90 seconds and it's the 90 seconds that matters most in deposition.

For carriers I use frequently, I rely on Continuous Monitoring in DOTScreener to flag changes between loads, and I log a fresh review whenever a flag fires.

The file is a record of the judgment I applied. If I can't show the judgment, I can't defend the selection.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com