In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, dig into issues of safety responsibility in the brokered-freight world after the Supreme Court’s May ruling removing a key defense many brokers have used in state courts to deflect civil lawsuits for “negligent hiring" after a crash.
The case's big impacts: Brokers need to be able to readily defend their cases against suits on the merits. As ongoing Overdrive coverage of the reaction to the ruling has shown, it's an open question just how freight middlemen end up demonstrating due diligence around carrier vetting.
The reality that lingers behind it all is the safety rating responsibility the law puts on the Secretary of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
A relative few of the smallest carriers with authority have ever been rated. Early results from Overdrive polling on the subject just last week show fewer than half of independents responding so far have a rating. Weigh in yourself below if you haven't already.
And rating outcomes trended negative for many years, as FMCSA placed emphasis on targeting resources toward problem carriers rather than the Satisfactory stamp of approval. The Trump administration's FMCSA in 2025 reversed that trend, in some ways, issuing a larger share of final Satisfactory ratings than in prior years, though overall finalized ratings fell off a cliff.
[Related: Owner-ops respond to broker group's freakout over SCOTUS decision]
In the podcast this week, hear insight from S2 International’s Jennifer Mead, honored last year by the National Association of Small Trucking Companies as 2025 Broker of the Year among its "Best Brokers" group of referred and creditworthy brokers.
Mead and S2 -- "knock on wood," she said -- have never been the target of a state civil post-crash suit, yet she fully expects more cases to be brought against brokers now. She’s not fundamentally worried about S2’s position, with the company focused mostly in the expedited-freight world and with much of their book of business running on trucks and in vans of close partner carriers they really take the time to truly get to know.
"We’re ahead of that game already," Mead said of vetting carriers, "especially because we’ve been so time- and service-sensitive. You don’t want to put just any local yokel on the load and have a [factory production] line shut down."
Hyper-cautious, S2 has used vetting systems like Highway and FreightValidate for checks, though mostly for monitoring purposes rather than front-end vetting. Such systems help with a "good database for insurance," she said, and "getting the notifications of when insurance is expiring."
[Related: Brokers' new 'carrier vetting' craze bad for trucking?]
Too many brokers/shippers just "check the insurance once and don’t pay attention to it," she said. For carrier onboarding with S2, "I try to reach out and talk to owners of the companies that we’re working with" to get a real feel for them as business owners, for their attention not only to service but safety.
S2's Jennifer Mead
That full-time job, she said, could be more part-time, in her view, noting agreement with many around trucking that "we should be able to rely more heavily on the government for that."
More safety rating from FMCSA could help.
[Related: FMCSA safety ratings fall off a cliff]
"I totally believe that we need better vetting" all around the industry, Mead said. "But now the government hasn’t really done their job" on true safety ratings, and it's "opened the door to the third-party vetting."
With the Supreme Court injecting new "negligent hiring" liability, Mead felt "the water’s getting muddier" around vetting standards, not clearer.
With all the private vetting systems and their scorecards and intrusive ID checks and the like rising up, and with some sensationalism around the Supreme Court ruling, brokers like Mead are hopeful it spurs the agency to do more rating, rather than just rest on the laurels of the third-party vetting services, with the hope that the market fills in the gaps.
[Related: Owner-ops respond to broker group's freakout over SCOTUS decision]
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NASTC as an association has long argued for definitive safety rating covering a broader universe of carriers, and association President David Owen’s letter to Congress we reported on last week re-emphasized the need.
Owen pledged to association members the organization would do its own ratings for them.
"In the not too distant future as a NASTC member," he writes, if any member's not received a New Entrant audit or "if you're unrated, we are prepared to issue a rating on your behalf."
Owen's long considered doing that as a kind of private safety certification on top of the benefits of membership in NASTC, available to member carriers to market and/or for brokers in its Best Brokers group to access, among other ways to potentially distribute.
The most "perfectly safe" carriers, Owen said, are too often those with no rating, and/or with little-to-no violation data in the system giving FMCSA any reason to ever bother looking at them. No investigation, no audit = no possibility of a rating.
S2's Jennifer Mead felt any private safety rating system such as that, should it really rest on a solid foundation of information, could be a beneficial addition to the current landscape. Hear more from her in this week's podcast.
