Uber Lawyers Unfazed After Passenger Sexual Assault Verdicts

Uber Technologies Inc. has struck a defiant tone after three recent jury verdicts in passenger sexual assault cases, with its legal team arguing that the outcomes have actually shown the strength of its defenses and dampened “unrealistic expectations” of high-figure settlements.

Despite liability findings against Uber in two of those trials, the rideshare company’s top attorneys defending thousands of similar cases said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg Law that Uber views the verdicts as mostly positive, and the company has no plans to change its defense strategy.

“We are in no way deterred, I think quite the opposite,” said Allison Brown of Kirkland & Ellis, who was Uber’s lead attorney in two of the three bellwether jury trials.

Allison Brown of Kirkland & Ellis

Photo courtesy of Kirkland & Ellis

“While we are always open to entertaining reasonable paths to resolution, we are fully prepared to try more cases and to put this evidence and our story and our support for safety before jurors in other jurisdictions,” she said.

“The plaintiffs bar has an unrealistic expectation of what a resolution should look like and the strength of their own inventory,” she continued. “And so I am hopeful that these recent jury verdicts that can no way have been close to the amount of money they hoped to recover, will bring some of their expectations and demands into the realm of reality.”

Uber was cleared of liability in its first passenger sexual assault jury trial in California state court last year. The verdict said that while Uber was negligent in its safety standards, that negligence wasn’t a substantial cause of an alleged passenger sexual assault.

But in February, Uber lost its first federal bellwether case in Arizona, with a jury finding the company was legally responsible for a driver who raped a passenger and awarding $8.5 million.

The second federal bellwether trial in North Carolina this month was far narrower, involving an act of unwanted touching. The jury awarded the plaintiff $5,000.

Uber’s Associate General Counsel of Complex Insurance Litigation & Strategy Maureen Frangopoulos said the company has had “resolution conversations” with plaintiff’s attorneys and is willing to have more in the future. She declined to provide any details about those conversations.

The next bellwether trials are scheduled for this fall in San Francisco.

‘A Strong Message’ on Safety

The company has long faced claims that it prioritizes profits over passenger safety and must confront legal consequences for drivers who sexually assault or harm riders.

But as bellwether cases—pulled from thousands of state and federal lawsuits to test a range of fact patterns and legal theories—have moved to trial, Uber has steadfastly argued that it invests heavily in safety. It’s told juries it conducts multi-step background checks on drivers and creates features that allow riders to share their route with others and an emergency police button. It’s also argued that sexual assaults make up far less than 1% of the billions of annual rides it facilitates.

Brown and Frangopoulos said the verdicts have shown that juries have not bought into claims that the company has put profits over safety.

Even in the Arizona case, the jury rejected arguments that Uber had acted negligently in its safety practices.

There, the plaintiff asked the jury to award $24 million to compensate her for her past and future mental health harms, and around $120 million in punitive damages to punish Uber for its lax safety standards. The panel awarded $8.5 million.

The verdict in Arizona “was a very strong message from the jury that Uber acted appropriately and takes safety seriously,” Brown said. Frangopoulos also said the company will have a strong case on appeal based on incorrect jury instructions.

And in the North Carolina case, the plaintiff voluntarily dropped her negligence claim, only advancing a claim that Uber had a duty to protect its passengers. The judge had already determined before the trial that Uber had heightened legal duty over its passengers, which the two lawyers said was contrary to that state’s common carrier law.

“When you look at the totality of these verdicts, especially for that first federal court trial where they want to hit on negligence and they want to see huge punitive damages, there was a lot of success for us in these outcomes,” Frangopoulos said.

The two attorneys said many of the remaining lawsuits are far weaker for the plaintiffs than the cases tested at trial so far, noting that many have been dismissed for failure to provide basic information like ride receipts.

Uber Associate General Counsel Maureen Frangopoulos

Photo provided courtesy of Uber

In a statement, the co-lead counsel of the plaintiffs in the federal multidistrict litigation against Uber said the company is trying to “minimize these historic verdicts” by “spinning consecutive trial losses into something less significant.”

The statement said juries in different jurisdictions around the country have found the “testimony of women passengers credible, and Uber responsible for the egregious acts of its drivers.”

“Uber has every reason to be concerned, with more than 3,000 additional claims in the MDL ready to go,” the statement said, which was authored by Rachel Abrams of Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise LLP, Sarah London of Girard Sharp LLP, and Roopal Luhana of Chaffin Luhana LLP. “Yet the company continues to malign its passengers in and out of court.”

“If Uber devoted even a fraction of its legal budget to safety enhancements, it might not be in this situation,” the counsel’s statement said.