CarrierMark Vault seals a tamper-evident, timestamped record of the carrier’s public safety data and your vetting decision at the moment you book. Years later, when the question is what you knew and what you did, the answer is a document, not a memory.
On May 14, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that federal law does not preempt state negligent-selection claims against freight brokers. The preemption argument brokers leaned on for decades is no longer a reliable way out of these cases. Negligent-selection claims now proceed into full discovery, in any state court, anywhere your loads run.
Discovery in these cases targets your selection process. What your software showed. What your monitoring logs recorded. Whether your own system flagged the carrier, and what your team did next. Plaintiff firms publish these target lists openly.
Here is the problem: the public record moves every day. Authority status, insurance filings, inspection history, safety ratings, all of it changes. The lawsuit arrives years after the booking. Without a booking-date record, your defense becomes testimony about what your process “would have shown.” An argument, where an exhibit should be.
In Montgomery itself, the plaintiff alleged the carrier held a “conditional” safety rating from FMCSA when the broker hired it. The case turned on what the broker knew, or should have known, that day.
As even plaintiff’s counsel stressed, brokers should be able to successfully defend against state tort suits if the brokers have acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies.— Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, No. 24-1238, slip op. at 5 (U.S. May 14, 2026) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring)
Even the plaintiff’s own lawyer told the Supreme Court a broker “is not going to have a problem if it’s asking the hard questions of the carrier.” Id. (quoting Tr. of Oral Arg. 45).
The Court did not make brokers the insurers of every truck on the road. It made your selection process the question. Reasonable care, documented when it happened, is a defense. Undocumented care is a story.
Vault is the record of asking the hard questions.
Define your carrier-selection criteria once: operating authority, insurance on file, safety rating, out-of-service history, whatever your standard requires. Policies are versioned. You can prove which rules were in force on any given date.
At selection, Vault pulls the carrier’s public FMCSA record and seals it: a timestamped snapshot of exactly what was knowable on the day you tendered the load. Raw data preserved as pulled. Nothing summarized away.
When business requires an exception, it runs through a structured override with a documented justification and an approver. No free-text landmines. No silent workarounds.
One click produces the booking-date record: the sealed snapshot, the policy version in force, the decision trail, bound in a tamper-evident chain proving nothing was altered after the fact.
Vault is not an onboarding packet tool. It is not a monitoring subscription. It is not a carrier safety predictor. Keep the platforms you use to find, onboard, and track carriers. Vault sits alongside them as the evidence layer.
And one thing we will never do: tell you a carrier is “safe.” Nobody can promise you a carrier is safe, and a vendor who does is drafting a plaintiff’s exhibit. Vault documents the thing the law actually asks of you: reasonable care, exercised with the information available, recorded when it happened.
CarrierMark Vault was designed by Thomas Murphree, founder of Murphree Holdings and a practicing trucking-defense litigator and CDL holder. It is built around the document requests plaintiff’s counsel actually serves: the vetting file, the flag history, the override trail. Every design decision answers a question he has watched get asked under oath.
We are onboarding a founding cohort of 8 brokerages before general availability.
Enter a DOT number and get a free snapshot of the carrier’s current public FMCSA record, formatted the way Vault seals it.
Your vetting decisions are discoverable with or without Vault. Silence is not protection; a gap in the file is. The override workflow exists so a business judgment is recorded as a judgment: what was known, what justified proceeding, who approved it. A documented decision can be defended. A missing one cannot.
Because the legal standard is reasonable care with available information, not perfect information. Vault preserves what was publicly knowable at booking. Your policy decides what weight each data point carries.
Keep it. Those tools answer “who is this carrier and how are they performing.” Vault answers “what did we know, and what did we do, when we selected them,” in a form built for the courtroom rather than the back office.
Assume yes, like the rest of your operational records. Vault’s purpose is to make the discoverable record complete, contemporaneous, and tamper-evident instead of partial and reconstructed.
The founding cohort onboards within two weeks. The free snapshot tool is live now.
Founding cohort applications are open. The free snapshot tool is live now.