TMS Expands Its Reach as Legal Risk and Fraud Reshape Freight Software

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling handed down in May has freight brokers and 3PLs rethinking how they vet, document and defend their carrier-selection programs — and it is transportation management system (TMS) software that they expect to do the heavy lifting.

In Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, the justices found that freight brokers may be held financially liable for highway accidents involving trucks they hired, even when those motor carriers were federally licensed and had met safety requirements set by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The decision landed just months after another regulation affecting brokers and forwarders, the FMCSA's Broker and Freight Forwarder Financial Responsibility rule, took effect. That rule requires brokers and freight forwarders to share their records with shippers and truckers and to maintain $75,000 in bonds.

Why is the TMS suddenly doing so much more?

For decades, TMS software paid for itself by generating savings and efficiencies in straightforward freight hauls. Recent months have changed the job description. Companies now juggle variables that shift day to day: radical swings in diesel fuel prices caused by geopolitical conflict, attacks on containerships and sudden closures of ocean lanes, soaring cargo theft rates, and unexpected court rulings that place new legal burdens on businesses.

"For most of the last two decades, a TMS existed to execute a shipment, price it, and track it through delivery. That was the job," said Raddy Velkov, senior vice president of carrier sales and strategy at BlueGrace Logistics, a Florida-based 3PL. "Today, the same platform is being asked to absorb a much wider set of forces at once: legal and security risk, cost volatility, and global disruption, often in the same week."

Velkov noted that none of those four pressures existed at this intensity five years ago. BlueGrace built its own TMS, called BlueShip, but sources its security-analysis data externally. "The data that tells you whether a carrier is who it claims to be, in real time, across the country, is an industry-scale problem" that requires far more information than a single company can collect, he explained.

How are vendors responding?

Solana Beach, California-based Alvys expanded its platform with automated carrier vetting and continuous monitoring. "The shift isn't about the TMS adding more features; it's about the TMS changing shape. Alvys' answer is to make the TMS the orchestration layer rather than the do-everything application," said CEO Nick Darman, describing the model as "TMS-as-hub plus best-of-breed intelligence, connected by automation rather than by people switching between a bunch of tabs."

Alvys recently launched "Alvys Foundry," an agentic AI platform that lets freight teams deploy pre-built or custom AI agents inside their existing TMS. It ships with more than 20 pre-built agent templates covering common workflows — collecting status updates from drivers, handling invoice and settlement prep, tracking exceptions — and also accepts customer-built or Alvys-built custom agents. The firm also opened its TMS to fleets of all sizes, democratizing the technology for owner-operators and smaller carriers alongside the larger trucking companies it has traditionally supported.

Brandon, Florida-based Ascend TMS targets the same small end of the market. "The top 200 brokers and the top 100 carriers have big budgets and IT teams, but everybody else doesn't. So we offer a free TMS option for SMBs, those people with just three, four, or five trucks or brokers," said founder, president and CEO Tim Higham, adding that anyone in freight "has to have the capability to transact digitally."

Ascend skips building its own vetting module and instead integrates with Highway, Truckstop's RMIS, Search Carrier and Descartes' MyCarrierPortal — no-code integrations small players can actually use.

Can vetting tools keep out the bad actors?

There's a catch: cargo thieves use the same services. "The bad actors are using all the same tools, including the APIs, and they're looking for cracks to sneak through," Higham said. "Everybody is pasting over the old cracks as fast as we can, whether it's fraud, double-brokering, or theft."

Velkov argued the platform must ultimately keep shippers carrier-agnostic and mobile: "When the landscape shifts — whether it's a legal standard, a fraud pattern, a fuel spike, or a disrupted shipping lane — the platform has to let us move freight to whichever mode and carrier makes sense in the moment."

In a turbulent era for transportation, TMS users everywhere want one thing above all — predictability. With liability rulings and bond rules now on the books and fraud tactics evolving in parallel, vendors on both the build and integrate sides will keep racing to deliver it.