I came up in insurance and risk before I built freight technology. So I read the Supreme Court’s Montgomery v. Caribe decision in May the way an old underwriter reads any ruling: as a repricing event. And the repricing has already started.
Watch how it moves. A broker gets sued over a carrier it picked. The insurer, seeing where truck verdicts are headed, reprices the account, and the renewal letter that comes back is either a lot higher or it doesn’t come back at all. So the broker pays more, for coverage and for the vetting that might keep the next claim off the books, and every dollar of it flows into rates until it lands on the one party that never touched the truck. The shipper.
The Lawsuits Are Real, and They Have Names
Start with the case that changed the rule. Montgomery v. Caribe named C.H. Robinson, the largest freight broker in North America. It started with a wreck in Illinois. A Caribe Transport driver was hauling a load Robinson had brokered, and Shawn Montgomery walked away from it with permanent injuries. Robinson reached for the preemption defense brokers have hidden behind for a decade, and the court took it away, 9-0. (We broke the whole ruling down in SCOTUS Reset.)
Then, four days later, the part that should actually scare brokers. The 4th Circuit took a case Echo Global had already won, erased the win, and sent it back to be retried under the new rule. A 2022 wreck on I-85 in South Carolina. A carrier Echo had hired. A file everyone assumed was closed, open again.
That’s the tell. Every negligent-selection claim that used to die quietly on preemption is breathing again, in every state where a broker books a load. And the plaintiff’s bar has already written the playbook.
What MOTUS Covers, and What Falls to You
The same week the court ruled, FMCSA flipped on MOTUS, the system that finally retires the decades-old Unified Registration System. Credit where it’s due. Every applicant now runs through real identity and business verification, handled by IDEMIA and CLEAR, and the automated checks catch the kind of inconsistencies that used to let a shut-down carrier reappear a week later under a brand-new name. The front door has a lock now.
But a lock on the front door is still a one-time check at the threshold. MOTUS clears a carrier the day it registers. Montgomery makes you answer for that carrier the day you hand it a load, and the day after that, and the load after that. The carrier you cleared in March can fall apart by June. Authority lapses. Insurance gets canceled. The crash record starts to turn. MOTUS tells you the carrier is who it claims to be. Whether it’s safe today is a question you have to keep asking, one load at a time.
Why Your Renewal Is About to Get Harder
This is where my old world comes in. Underwriters price what they can measure, and the numbers they’re measuring right now are ugly. The federal liability floor for a carrier is still $750,000, a figure set in 1985 and never raised since. The average nuclear verdict in a truck case, meanwhile, has run from $2.3 million in 2010 to a projected $51 million in 2024. FMCSA is expected to push the minimum to $2 million or more, and brokers should pencil in liability premiums up 20-40% for the 2026-2027 cycle. Some aren’t getting quoted at all.
When the underwriter reprices you, the whole conversation collapses into one question. Can you prove you took care choosing your carriers? What they want to see is a living record of how you checked every carrier, on every load. The onboarding certificates sitting in your files were never going to carry that weight.
Underwrite Yourself
The brokers who get through this in one piece all land on the same move. They underwrite themselves.
In practice, that means authority, insurance, and safety signals checked against live data at tender, at booking, at pickup, not a PDF someone pulled 90 days ago. Every check stamped with a time. A carrier’s status slips, and the system flags it before the load rolls instead of after the claim.
That’s the part EKA owns. Our Risk and Compliance Guardrails run the verification in real time, inside the same platform that runs the load, so vetting stops being a separate chore somebody skips on a busy Friday. And the record it leaves behind happens to serve the two people who decide your future: the adjuster reading your file at renewal, and the attorney reading it after a crash. Same record. It has to hold up for both.
The standard of care the court just drew is the one we’ve been building toward, and there’s more of it arriving this summer.
Shippers Are in This Chain Too
If you move freight, don’t file this under broker problems. It rolls downhill. The brokers swallowing higher premiums and real vetting costs will pass them along, and the ones who can’t show their work become a liability you’re standing right next to. Montgomery wrote the shipper into the selection chain. Choosing a broker is a risk decision now, every bit as much as it’s a rate decision.
The Bottom Line
Two things landed in May. A court that turned carrier selection into a liability, and a registration system that proves who a carrier is without saying a word about whether it’s safe tomorrow. Between them sits a duty that never clocks out. You can keep it in a folder and explain it later, under oath, or you can build it into how you run and have it ready when the renewal letter or the lawsuit comes asking. Talk to EKA about putting that record in place before you need it.