Litigation is theater with a script, and after this year's Montgomery ruling opened brokers to negligent-selection claims nationwide, the script for these cases is being standardized in plaintiff firms right now. The productive move isn't to dread it. It's to read it early — because every document on the request list is one you can fix today and none you can fix after the crash.
Here's the list, and what a good answer looks like.
"Produce your written carrier-selection policy." The trap has two doors: no policy (the standard of care gets written by the other side's expert) or an aspirational policy your team doesn't actually follow (every deviation becomes Exhibit A). The defensible version is a realistic standard — the checks you genuinely run, the thresholds that genuinely fail a carrier — applied consistently, with a documented exception path for the edge cases.
"Produce the onboarding file for this carrier." This is the case. What the file should show: authority status and history reviewed, dated; safety performance examined against defined thresholds; insurance verified — not a PDF filed, but coverage confirmed — with cargo limits noted; identity checks run; who approved, when, against what standard. What files too often show: a W-9, an unverified COI, and silence.
"Identify all safety data available to you on the selection date." The dangerous word is available. FMCSA records are public; plaintiff's counsel will establish what you could have seen, then ask why you didn't. Your answer needs to be "we reviewed it — here's the dated pull," not a debate about whether looking was customary.
"Produce all communications regarding this load." The 4:50pm Friday emails. If the record shows your process was compressed or skipped under deadline, that pressure becomes the story of the case. A process that runs in seconds, automatically, has no deadline exception to discover.
"Produce evidence of monitoring after onboarding." The frontier request. A carrier vetted eighteen months before the crash, never re-checked, invites the negligent-retention theory that's already forming in post-Montgomery commentary. Continuous monitoring — with alerts and responses logged — closes it.
The pattern across all five
Every request tests the same thing: whether your care was systematic and recorded or ad hoc and remembered. Memory doesn't testify well. Records do.
Which reframes what vetting software is actually for. When Dollar Traq vets a carrier, the by-product of the work is the discovery response: every check Sentinel ran, dated, sourced to the government record, per carrier; every COI verified and monitored; every alert logged. Kavanaugh's concurrence in Montgomery all but published the defense — reasonable procedures, consistently applied. The playbook above is just the test of whether you can prove you have them.
General information about litigation patterns, not legal advice — build your policy and retention schedule with transportation counsel.