Uber’s Terms of Use Fails to Split Up Mass Sexual Assault Suits

Uber Technologies Inc. failed to wield the language of the rideshare app’s terms of use to break up hundreds of sexual assault lawsuits from passengers consolidated in one San Francisco federal court.

Judge Charles R. Breyer on Monday said the terms of use agreement specifying that passengers can’t participate in a “coordinated” or “consolidated” legal action against the company would “nullify the judiciary’s ability to manage litigation currently pending in the federal courts.”

Breyer, writing for the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said that clause in the agreement “substantially interferes with the public interests that Congress sought to advance” when it created the multidistrict litigation, so the clause is unenforceable. In an MDL, lawsuits with similar underlying facts but filed in different courts across the country are consolidated before a single judge to increase efficiency.

Breyer is overseeing an MDL with more than 200 lawsuits claiming that passengers were sexually assaulted by legitimate and illegitimate Uber drivers. The passengers argue that Uber owed a duty of care to mitigate the assaults while also deceptively advertising that its service was safe for riders.

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which determines which cases should be consolidated and where, created the Uber MDL in October 2023. Uber has separately petitioned the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the consolidation decision.

Uber filed a motion in February explaining that the app’s terms of use contain a “non-consolidation clause,” which prevents users from participating in coordinated proceedings like MDLs, and a “forum selection clause” that requires users to sue in the district where the alleged assault occurred.

Uber asked Breyer to either dismiss the suits or transfer them under the forum selection clause.

Breyer’s Monday opinion said that unlike a terms of use agreement’s arbitration clause or class action waiver, Uber’s non-consolidation clause will strip courts of basic procedural tools to manage their dockets.

“Parties may be able to bargain away their right to bring actions on behalf of others, but they cannot bargain away a court’s power to manage a large number of individual cases before it,” the judge said.

Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise LLP, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, and Chaffin Luhana LLP are co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP represent Uber.

The case is In re: Uber Techs., Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litig., N.D. Cal., No. 3:23-md-03084, 5/21/24.