The highest-consequence process in a brokerage, and the one most often owned by whoever has a spare minute.
The vetting standard, separation of vetting from dispatch, the fraud taxonomy, re-verification triggers, the technology landscape, incident response, and onboarding cycle time.
In May 2026 the Supreme Court held that state-law negligent-hiring claims against brokers are not preempted. Preemption is no longer a reliable early exit, which means the case turns on what you can show you checked. If your vetting record is a conversation rather than a file, that is a different kind of problem than it was in April.
The person who verifies the carrier is not the person who needs the load covered. That is not an efficiency preference — it is the single structural control in the chapter.
No industry benchmarks. Where a figure appears it is either sourced to a public filing and cited, or labelled as the author’s own judgment. Written by an operator with fifteen years building and scaling freight brokerages.