Uber to face 1,600 sexual assault cases together

“It’s a great win for consumers and a bad day for tech companies”

Uber Technologies Inc. lost in its attempt to split up more than 1,600 lawsuits filed by riders who allege they were sexually assaulted by drivers for the rideshare app.

Uber had appealed to a San Francisco federal appeals court in a bid to force each case to be heard individually, as it argued the cases are too different to group together, and also that Uber’s terms of use bar plaintiffs from seeking multidistrict litigation (MDL).

The plaintiffs allege Uber failed to conduct adequate background checks on its drivers or to implement appropriate safety measures. Asserting negligence, product liability, fraud and misrepresentation, they say the company is vicariously liable for the acts of its drivers, including assault, rape and false imprisonment.

“It’s a great win for consumers and a bad day for tech companies,” Kathryn Kosmides, an advocate at Helping Survivors told the LA Times. “This latest ruling sets precedent around app safety. A lot of companies are very nervous about what happens [next] in this case.”

In its latest safety report covering the years 2021-2022, Uber said that 99.9% of trips were completed without any type of reported safety incident.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Uber’s argument that the terms of use agreement for its app prohibit passengers from engaging in coordinated or consolidated lawsuits against the company.

Observers tracking the case feared that if Uber could easily unwind cases the government binds together, other big companies would write identical provisions into their own terms of use, tangling federal civil courts in endless duplicative lawsuits — making it much harder for victims to collect damages.

The lawsuits were consolidated in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in 2023 by The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML), the federal judicial body that determines whether nationwide lawsuits with similar facts and allegations should be consolidated and tried together. The JPML is responsible for centralizing related cases into multidistrict litigation to improve efficiency, prevent duplicative discovery, and avoid conflicting rulings. The panel decides whether to transfer cases to a single district court and assigns them to a judge for pretrial proceedings.