Negligent selection 101
The lawsuit you don't want to be in.
If you broker freight in the US, negligent-selection liability is the single largest catastrophic risk on your balance sheet. It's also the easiest to defend against — if you have the paper.
What it is
Negligent selection is the legal theory that a broker can be held liable when a carrier they hired causes harm — typically in a crash, theft, or cargo claim — if the broker knew or should have known the carrier was unsafe. The standard is roughly: what would a reasonable broker have checked?
The verdicts
- Schramm v. Foster — $23.8M. Broker held liable for hiring a carrier with a poor safety profile on a single load.
- Sperl v. C.H. Robinson — $23.7M. Jury found the broker had exercised enough control over the carrier's operations to be on the hook.
- GrayCo verdict — $100M+. One of the largest negligent-selection verdicts on record.
These are not edge cases. Plaintiff firms have publicly built playbooks around them.
What "defensible" actually means
Courts and insurers want to see four things, per load:
- You looked at FMCSA data at the time of booking — not last quarter.
- You checked the things a reasonable broker checks: authority, insurance, safety rating, OOS rates, crash history.
- You collected the evidence — COI, W-9, packet — and tied it to this load.
- A named human signed off, and the record can't be altered after the fact.
That's what BrokerShield generates. Per load. For a dollar.