The New Standard: Why 'Reasonable Care' Is Becoming the Most Important Phrase in Freight

Every profession has a phrase that quietly governs its legal exposure. For doctors it's "standard of care." For accountants it's "generally accepted." For freight brokers and the shippers behind them, the phrase that is rapidly becoming the most consequential in the business is **"reasonable care."**

It sounds soft. Lawyerly. Easy to wave away. It is none of those things. "Reasonable care" is the precise legal standard a jury applies when it decides whether your company is liable for a catastrophic truck crash — and the entire negligent-selection theory that's reshaping broker liability runs through it. If you understand what it means and operationalize it, you're defensible. If you leave it undefined, a plaintiff's expert will define it for you, in front of a jury, as high as the facts allow.

Let me unpack the actual legal machinery, because the concepts are knowable and they tell you exactly what to build.

What "reasonable care" actually means

Negligence — the legal theory underneath most truck-accident claims against brokers and shippers — has four classic elements: **duty, breach, causation, and damages.** "Reasonable care" lives inside the first two.

Duty is the obligation to act with the care a reasonably prudent person (or company) would exercise under the circumstances. In the freight context, the emerging duty is roughly: a broker or shipper that selects a motor carrier to operate a heavy vehicle on public roads owes a duty to exercise *ordinary care* in that selection — because an unsafe carrier foreseeably endangers the public.

Breach is failing to meet that standard — doing less than a reasonably prudent broker would have done.

The standard is **ordinary care, not perfection.** This is the single most important thing for operators to internalize, and it cuts in your favor: you are *not* required to guarantee that no carrier you use ever crashes. You are not a safety insurer. You are required to do what a reasonable, prudent professional in your position would do. That's a meetable bar. The problem is that most operations don't meet it — not because the bar is high, but because they never defined what "reasonable" looks like and never recorded that they cleared it.

Foreseeability: the concept that does the work

The hinge of the whole analysis is **foreseeability.** The law holds you responsible for harms a reasonable person *should have anticipated* — not for freak, unforeseeable events. So the decisive question in a negligent-selection case is usually: *was this carrier's dangerousness foreseeable to you at the time you selected it?*

This is exactly why FMCSA's free public data is so legally radioactive. When a carrier's poor safety profile — a Conditional rating, Alert-status BASICs, a high out-of-service rate, a crash pattern — is sitting in a public database on the tender date, the plaintiff argues that the danger was *eminently foreseeable.* You didn't need a crystal ball. You needed to click a link that everyone in the industry knows exists. Foreseeability, in that framing, isn't a close call; it's a layup.

And conversely: when a carrier's profile was *clean* on the tender date — and you documented that you checked — the foreseeability argument collapses. A reasonable broker couldn't have foreseen danger that the public data didn't show. The same concept that hangs careless operators exonerates careful ones. The variable, again, is whether you looked and whether you can prove it.

The standard is hardening right now

For years, brokers had a way to avoid the reasonable-care analysis entirely: argue that state negligence law was *preempted* by the FAAAA (49 U.S.C. § 14501(c)) and that the claim should be dismissed before anyone asked whether care was reasonable. That shield is eroding. Courts split over whether the statute's safety exception lets negligent-selection claims through, the lower-court trend moved against blanket preemption, and as I write this in early May 2026, **the Supreme Court has the question under submission in *Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II.*** A decision is expected within weeks.

I won't predict the holding here. But the strategic reality is already set: whether or not preemption survives in some form, the durable trend is that brokers will increasingly have to defend the *reasonableness* of their carrier selections on the merits — which means "reasonable care" moves from a doctrine you could sometimes dodge to the standard you'll routinely be measured against. (When the Court rules, I'll publish a full breakdown.) The smart move is to assume you'll have to prove reasonable care on every load, and build accordingly.

Operationalizing reasonable care

Here's the part that turns legal theory into something you can actually do. "Reasonable care" feels vague until you translate it into a concrete, repeatable process — and once you do, it stops being a liability and becomes a defense. To operationalize it:

1. Define your standard in writing. Decide, in advance, what a reasonable selection looks like for your operation: active authority, adequate non-lapsing insurance, an acceptable safety rating, BASIC percentiles below intervention thresholds, no disqualifying crash pattern. Now "reasonable care" has a definition — *yours* — instead of being whatever a plaintiff's expert claims it should be.

2. Apply it on every load, at tender. Reasonable care is judged at the moment of the decision, against what was knowable then. Screen the carrier's current profile at tender, not just at onboarding.

3. Create contemporaneous evidence. A reasonable process that leaves no trace is, in a courtroom, indistinguishable from no process. Capture a timestamped record of what was checked, when, by whom, and what the carrier attested to.

4. Handle exceptions deliberately. Sometimes you'll use a carrier with a blemish for a good reason. Reasonable care doesn't forbid that — it requires that the decision be *considered and documented*, by someone accountable, with a rationale. An undocumented exception is a gift to the plaintiff; a documented, reasoned one is often defensible.

5. Be consistent. Reasonable care is undermined by your worst load, not flattered by your best. One undocumented tender lets the plaintiff argue your "standard" is theater.

Reasonable care that can't be proven is no care at all

I'll end where the whole thing converges. Reasonable care is a meetable standard — ordinary prudence, not perfection. Most careful operators are *already* exercising something close to it in spirit. The failure is almost never that brokers are reckless; it's that they're careful *invisibly.* They do the reasonable thing and keep no record, and so when the case comes, the reasonable thing they did doesn't exist as far as the jury is concerned.

So the operational mandate is simple to state and easy to underestimate: make your reasonable care *visible and provable.* Define the standard, apply it every time, and capture the evidence automatically. That's the entire purpose of DOTScreener — to turn "we exercised reasonable care" from a phrase your lawyer hopes a jury believes into a timestamped, attestation-backed record your lawyer can put on the screen. In the freight business of 2026 and beyond, "reasonable care" is the phrase that decides who pays. Make sure yours is documented.

— Mason Lavallet

Founder, DOTScreener.com

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Sources

• [Restatement (Second) of Torts § 411 — Negligent Selection; and the negligence framework (duty, breach, causation, damages)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/negligence)
• [49 U.S.C. § 14501(c) — FAAAA preemption and the motor-vehicle safety exception](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/14501)
• [FMCSA SAFER Company Snapshot](https://safer.fmcsa.dot.gov/CompanySnapshot.aspx) — the public data that drives foreseeability
• [FMCSA Safety Measurement System (CSA BASICs)](https://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov/)
• [Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) — Carrier Selection Framework](https://www.tianet.org/)