The carrier at the center of the Supreme Court's broker-liability ruling wasn't an obvious outlaw. It was a carrier with a Conditional FMCSA safety rating — legal to hire, still hauling freight, and now a cautionary tale for every brokerage in the country. In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, decided May 14, 2026, the court let a negligent-selection claim proceed against the broker that booked that carrier. The trap is that a Conditional rating sits in a gray zone: not disqualifying, but impossible to ignore once you've seen it. This is how the rating tiers actually work and how to handle marginal carriers without booking yourself into a lawsuit.

How FMCSA safety ratings work

After a compliance review, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration assigns a motor carrier one of three ratings. Many active carriers carry no rating at all because they've never been reviewed — which is its own gray zone.

• Satisfactory — The carrier has adequate safety management controls. This is the clean signal.
• Conditional — The carrier lacks adequate safety management controls and has deficiencies serious enough that violations could occur. It can keep operating, but the rating is a documented warning.
• Unsatisfactory — The carrier's controls are inadequate and have produced violations. This is effectively a stop: an Unsatisfactory carrier is generally barred from operating.
• Unrated — No compliance review has been done. Absence of a rating is not the same as a clean one.

In the Montgomery case, the carrier's Conditional rating came with deficiencies in driver qualification, hours-of-service compliance, vehicle inspection and maintenance, and recordable crash rate — every one of them visible in public FMCSA records before the load moved (Cornell Law). That visibility is the whole problem.

Why "Conditional" is the dangerous middle

An Unsatisfactory carrier you simply can't use. A Satisfactory carrier is an easy yes. Conditional is the one that gets brokers sued, because it's a carrier you can legally book but shouldn't book carelessly. Hire it without a second thought and you've ignored a published red flag. After Montgomery, that decision is no longer shielded by FAAAA preemption — the claim goes to a jury, which gets to decide whether a reasonable broker would have booked that carrier on that day. For the full picture of how the preemption shield fell, see our Montgomery ruling breakdown.

The exposure isn't theoretical. Plaintiffs' attorneys increasingly name brokers alongside carriers, and trucking verdicts have grown brutal — the median nuclear verdict hit $36 million in 2022, roughly 50% above the 2013 median (FleetOwner). A single Conditional-rated booking that goes wrong can put your brokerage in that room.

Does a Conditional rating mean you can never book the carrier?

No — and treating it as an automatic ban would shrink your capacity for no good reason, especially since most carriers are small operations doing honest work. The standard isn't perfection; it's reasonable care, documented. A Conditional rating raises the bar for how you book, not necessarily whether you book. The question shifts from "is this carrier allowed to operate?" to "can I show why hiring this carrier was a reasonable decision?"

That reframing is the entire defense. Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence pointed brokers toward it: those who do real diligence and document it "should still be able to defend these cases successfully" (Crowell & Moring).

Booking a marginal carrier defensibly

When a carrier comes back Conditional — or Unrated with thin history — don't reflexively book and don't reflexively reject. Run a documented exception process:

• Pull the detail, not just the label. Open the CSA BASIC scores and the compliance-review findings. A Conditional rating driven by paperwork lapses is different from one driven by Unsafe Driving and crash rate.
• Check whether it's stale. Ratings can lag a carrier's actual operations by years. Look for recent inspections and current insurance to see if the picture has improved.
• Require a reason to proceed. If you book, record the specific justification: updated scores, clean recent inspections, verified insurance, shipper urgency, no better-rated capacity available.
• Get a named approval. A marginal carrier should clear a supervisor, not a single rushed rep — and that approval should be logged with a timestamp.
• Re-check before reuse. A Conditional carrier you booked safely in March is not pre-cleared for June. Re-pull the rating each time.

The point isn't to create paperwork for its own sake. It's that the paperwork is the defense. A booked-and-justified Conditional carrier is defensible; a booked-and-forgotten one is an exhibit. For more on why the record matters most, read Document or Defend, and for the full eight-point vetting standard, see the Carrier Vetting Checklist 2.0.

Why this is hard to do by hand

The reason marginal carriers slip through isn't ignorance — it's volume and speed. A rep covering a load at 5 p.m. with one Conditional carrier showing available capacity is exactly where the shortcut happens. Catching every Conditional rating, forcing an exception workflow, and logging the justification on every booking is more discipline than most teams can sustain manually across hundreds of loads a month.

This is where automation changes the math. Debales deploys AI agents that handle carrier communications and load tendering and flag a carrier's safety signals in the moment — capturing the rating, the justification, and the approval as a clean, timestamped record on every booking. The exception process becomes the default path instead of a step someone has to remember. The diligence you can prove is the diligence that protects you.

The takeaway

A Conditional rating is no longer a quiet line item — it's the precise fact a plaintiff's attorney is looking for. You don't have to refuse those carriers. You have to book them like someone might ask you to justify it later, because now they can. Make the exception process automatic, log every decision, and the dangerous middle stops being a trap.

See how Debales captures carrier safety checks and approvals automatically across every load. Learn more at debales.ai.