Your annual Motor Vehicle Record (MVR) process may satisfy regulatory minimums, but it creates what risk and safety experts call a "visibility gap". This dangerous blind spot between pulls significantly increases your risk of violations, crashes, costly claims and litigation.
SambaSafety hosted a critical webinar, "Why Your Annual MVR Strategy Is a Legal Time Bomb (And How to Defuse It)," examining why the reliance on this traditional approach has become a liability magnet. With costly verdicts on the rise and courts increasingly recognizing a higher standard of care, the "I didn't know" defense no longer provides adequate protection.
The session, led by John Diana, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, and Amy Wilson, Vice President of Product Management, reveals how skilled attorneys use these visibility gaps as the foundation for negligence claims. Between annual checks, drivers can receive DUIs, violations or lose their licenses entirely, leaving companies legally exposed and operationally vulnerable if the driver does not self-report.
Throughout the webinar, our risk and litigation experts explore:
The insights shared during this webinar provide a roadmap for organizations ready to move beyond compliance-only approaches and implement strategies that reduce costly claims, minimize litigation exposure and protect their drivers, brand and bottom line.
The blind spot between annual MVR pulls, also known as the visibility gap, creates dangerous legal liabilities.
A quick example shared during the webinar illustrates this perfectly: A driver receives a clean MVR on January 2nd, giving fleet managers confidence they can operate company vehicles. But during a road trip later that year, they're caught speeding. Depending on the severity and their violation history, this could lead to a suspended license. Now you have a driver representing your brand with a suspended license, potentially for months, until your next annual check reveals the issue. Multiply this scenario by your entire fleet size, and the visibility gap becomes a significant liability exposure.
Meanwhile, the risks that are hidden within this gap continue to escalate. SambaSafety's 2025 Driver Risk Report uncovers how drivers with invalid licenses were responsible for 17.3% of fatal auto collisions in 2022, and those with a history of suspension or revocation are over four times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash.
Speeding trends are rising steadily since the pandemic, now accounting for 40% of major violations and serving as the leading factor in crashes resulting in fatalities. Speeding violations increase the likelihood of a future crash by 47%, yet traditional annual checks leave companies blind to these developing patterns for months at a time.
Distracted driving incidents are also surging, with 13% of all police-reported crashes in 2023 involving distracted driving, resulting in 324,819 injuries and 3,275 fatalities. These distractions are leading to higher-severity collisions, but annual MVR checks provide limited visibility into these behavioral risks.
The financial impact of the visibility gap extends well beyond safety concerns for fleet operators. Commercial vehicle insurance rates have jumped 11.1% year-over-year, nearly four times higher than overall inflation. While rising collision risks contribute to this surge, another major factor is auto manufacturers' shift toward sophisticated, lightweight components like sensors and cameras. These advanced parts require specialized expertise and significantly longer repair times, driving up labor costs and claims severity that fleet operators ultimately absorb through higher premiums.
Learn More About the Current State of Risk in SambaSafety's 2025 Driver Risk Report
During the webinar, John discusses how the legal landscape surrounding fleet management has fundamentally shifted, and compliance-only approaches now represent a dangerous gamble.
FMCSA regulation 49 CFR 391.25 requires motor carriers to annually obtain and review each driver's MVR from every state where they held a commercial license, evaluate drivers against safety requirements and maintain documentation. However, what satisfied legal requirements in the past now creates vulnerability in court.
Courts increasingly recognize a higher standard of care that extends far beyond the regulatory minimums. The industry standard of care now includes continuous visibility into employee driving behavior and history. Organizations face greater liability exposure when they fail to monitor and act on readily available risk data, data that technology makes easily accessible.
With the advancement of technology comes the expectation of better risk insights. Since numerous resources are available to companies for identifying driver risk, courts expect organizations to know about the risks their employee drivers present. Failing to act on risk that is either known or easily knowable falls short of this standard and opens the door to negligence claims.
Simply remaining compliant has become a dangerous narrative that puts companies at greater risk for violations, crashes, rising insurance costs and costly verdicts. The 2025 Driver Risk Report states that the trucking industry alone paid over $165 million in nuclear verdicts in 2023.
Legal teams are employing increasingly sophisticated strategies, using Reptile Theory to paint companies as indifferent to public safety and dangerous to the community. When organizations maintain visibility gaps despite available technology, it becomes ammunition for plaintiff attorneys seeking to demonstrate corporate negligence.
John highlighted crucial research from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) that examined several thousand cases involving payments, both judgments and settlements, in crash claims. The predominant factor, almost more important than any other variable, was the driver history of the person in the crash.
"This is not about the facts of the case on the day of the crash," John explains. "It's about having this report card on the driver. If there's a poor driving history, that becomes a bad fact and puts you in a very disadvantaged position."
Amy and John outline four critical strategies that fleets must implement to build stronger legal defenses while reducing actual risk exposure:
Replace dangerous gaps with continuous, automated alerts about driver violations and license changes throughout the year. Instead of discovering a DUI or suspended license months after it occurred during your next annual check, get notified as soon as it's reported by the state.
This approach enables faster and more effective interventions. Continuous MVR monitoring can replace time-consuming manual MVR pulls from multiple state DMVs (see our Q&A section for more details) and automatically normalizes violation codes, saving significant administrative costs while ensuring continuous compliance.
Implement continuous tracking of violations, inspections, CDL status and DOT crashes to keep your regulated fleets FMCSA-compliant while improving CSA scores. This prevents costly audits and penalties while reducing violations that attorneys exploit in court.
Amy highlighted an often-overlooked benefit: "Sometimes these inspections come back clean, but there are still reported items on those inspections. Those can proactively inform you that we're seeing some issues with maintenance or something's looking different on the truck than we would like to see. So then you can get it into the shop early and often."
For regulated fleets, CSA monitoring also removes the administrative burden of tracking regulatory changes. "The burden of paying attention to changes made by the FMCSA can be taken off your plate," Amy explained, as solution providers actively monitor FMCSA requirement updates.
Continuous CSA monitoring is a critical step in helping prove that fleets actively monitored and addressed driver risks rather than ignoring regulatory red flags that attorneys use as evidence of negligence.
Leverage telematics devices to identify risky driving behaviors before they escalate, catching issues before law enforcement does or a crash occurs. Amy emphasized this addresses a critical blind spot: "What about those people who have clean MVRs, and yet in the cab itself, they're still showing some risky behavior?"
The solution lies in telematics monitoring that aggregates raw data from existing devices into simplified, contextualized alerts. This enables fleets to spot near-real-time risky behaviors and intervene immediately after incidents occur.
Amy discusses the coaching opportunity this creates: "Being able to get that near-real-time information allows you to have that one-on-one coaching opportunity to say, 'I want to just talk with you about what was observed, what was going on,' and ask them for their feedback about what happened from their perspective that made this harsh braking or hard turn take place."
This approach transforms monitoring from surveillance into mentoring, creating a partnership rather than punishment.
Insight without action breeds risk. Companies need an effective, documented method to intervene with drivers soon after risk is identified to prevent crashes, claims and litigation. Enrolling drivers in targeted fleet safety training courses is a proven strategy for reducing future violations and crashes while providing evidence that your company is actively mitigating exposure.
Amy stresses the importance of actionable solutions: "Knowing isn't fixing. One of my goals is not only to notify you of the right information that is relevant to you at the right time, it's also to make sure that we are giving you actions that you can take."
During the webinar, the hosts shared compelling results from SambaSafety's comprehensive analysis: Within 12 months of enrolling drivers in monitoring, companies see a 32% reduction in monthly violations and a 14% reduction in crashes.
The most striking finding: When companies combine continuous monitoring with training, they achieve a 77% reduction in violations, more than twice that of using monitoring alone.
"Add training, add interventions, add targeted microlearnings on very specific topics right as you learn about an event, and you can see it has a huge impact on driver behavior," John notes.
Positioning these tools as investments in your drivers' success and safety also transforms employee perception. SambaSafety's 2025 Driver Risk Report discusses how 75% of employees say they'd remain longer at a company that invests in their growth. The key is shifting from monitoring to mentoring, positioning technology as a tool for personalized employee development rather than surveillance.
As Amy emphasizes: "Share this with your fleet. Let them know how you're investing in them, and recognize those drivers who are performing well. They can showcase what we want in good driving behavior."
John: The FMCSA regulations do not specify the source, just that you need to pull an MVR.
Amy: Here are areas to understand risk before hiring that we've seen customers practice:
In the end, there are tools to help change behaviors and habits. It's more difficult when it becomes an attitude issue. If you not only teach your safety policy but practice it and bring the driver along on those practices, we've seen positive results.
John: Yes, your observation about nuclear verdicts and serious injury or death is consistent with our research. Regarding judgments in general, we don't have data that compares frequency of auto-related matters to other types of torts, but a couple of trends we have found are: (i) increase in settlements before trial because of fear of litigation and (ii) evidence that those settlements are often substantially higher than would have been awarded in trial (based on similar cases taken to trial).
John: Yes, continuous monitoring can replace annual MVR requirements in specific states. According to FMCSA guidance, employer notification systems that provide continuous updates on license status, crashes and violations satisfy the annual review requirement under 49 CFR 391.25.
Multiple states currently meet FMCSA guidance requirements where continuous monitoring fully replaces the annual MVR obligation. For drivers licensed in these qualifying states, continuous monitoring eliminates the need for annual pulls while providing ongoing visibility into violations and license changes.
For drivers in states that haven't implemented compliant systems, annual MVRs may still be required by law, though continuous monitoring provides enhanced risk management between annual checks. SambaSafety maintains current documentation on which states qualify for this replacement, as regulatory frameworks continue evolving.
The determination should be made on a state-by-state basis for your driver population, consulting current compliance guidance to ensure you meet all legal obligations while maximizing operational efficiency.
Don't wait until after a crash to identify gaps in your approach to driver risk management. Access the complete webinar recording below to discover how continuous visibility strategies and more targeted action can reduce your legal exposure while protecting your drivers, brand and bottom line.