C.H. Robinson has raised its carrier insurance floor, stopped booking Conditional-rated carriers, and added a waiting period for new operators. Other brokers are tightening standards too after a Supreme Court ruling removed the federal preemption that had often blocked negligent-hiring claims.
What brokers are doing: The largest brokers are rewriting carrier rules.
C.H. Robinson raised its carrier insurance minimum from the federal floor of $750K to $1M. It stopped booking Conditional-rated carriers, added a seven-day wait for new-authority carriers, and rejected carriers above FMCSA BASIC intervention thresholds. The company says the affected carriers account for less than 1% of its annual North America truckload volume.
Others are moving the same way. Echo Global Logistics lost a preemption win after the Fourth Circuit sent its case back to be argued on the merits.
The backstory: A unanimous Supreme Court ruling turned carrier vetting into potential evidence.
On May 14, the Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that the FAAAA safety exception allows an injured motorist to sue C.H. Robinson over a load it brokered to a Conditional-rated carrier whose driver caused a crash. The ruling resolves a circuit split and applies nationwide. The Court did not find C.H. Robinson liable. It only allowed the lawsuit to proceed. That distinction matters because brokers now have to assume every carrier-selection decision could later be reviewed in court.
The stealable move: A timestamped vetting record for every carrier and every load is becoming the defense. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that brokers should be able to defend these cases if they “acted reasonably and arranged transportation with reputable trucking companies.” That makes four practices the new baseline:
Bar Conditional-rated carriers
Set BASIC score cutoffs
Raise insurance minimums above the federal floor
Log every authority check with a date stamp
Shippers are pushing from the other side, writing vetting minimums, audit rights and indemnification clauses into broker contracts while the standards are still evolving.
What's next: The industry wants a federal standard, but there is no timeline. The Transportation Intermediaries Association has petitioned FMCSA to create a federal carrier-selection safety standard. The agency says it is not a “ratings agency” and has not indicated a rulemaking timeline.
Until then, the standard of care is whatever a jury decides was reasonable. Whether Uber Freight, RXO, and regional brokers adopt similar restrictions to CHR will determine how much spot capacity tightens for Conditional-rated carriers.
