The Uber sexual assault litigation

This is probably the most consequential ongoing case in this entire space, and not only for the people in it. The question the appellate courts are being asked, whether a company that arranges rides between strangers owes passengers the heightened, non-delegable duty of a common carrier, would apply to every platform that puts a customer alone with a contractor it recruited.

What the cases allege

The plaintiffs are not arguing that Uber committed assaults. They are arguing that Uber built a product with a foreseeable risk, marketed it on safety, and then made choices that increased the risk rather than reduced it.

The specific allegations recur across thousands of complaints:

• Inadequate driver screening. Reliance on name-based background checks rather than fingerprinting, and screening depth that allegedly lagged behind what taxi regulators required in the same cities.
• Failure to act on complaints. Reports of driver misconduct that allegedly did not result in deactivation, allowing the same driver to continue picking up passengers.
• Design choices that create the risk. A vulnerable passenger alone in a private vehicle with a stranger, frequently at night, sometimes intoxicated. It is a configuration Uber controls entirely through its matching system.
• Safety marketing. Public representations about rider safety that plaintiffs argue induced reliance and were not matched by internal practice.
• Contractor classification as a liability shield. Treating drivers as independent contractors while controlling matching, pricing, routing, ratings, and deactivation.

Uber denies the allegations and has contested them in every forum, winning the first trial in 2025.

How the MDL works

When thousands of similar federal lawsuits are filed in different districts, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation can consolidate them before one judge for pretrial proceedings. That is what MDL No. 3084 is. It sits in the Northern District of California, where Uber is headquartered.

Consolidation does not merge the cases. Each plaintiff keeps their own claim, their own damages, and their own attorney. What is shared is the expensive, repetitive work: discovery into Uber’s internal documents, expert testimony about screening practices, and rulings on legal questions common to everyone.

This structure is the only reason cases like these are practical. No individual plaintiff could fund discovery into a company of Uber’s size. Several thousand plaintiffs, sharing that cost once, can. No comparable consolidation exists on the Lyft side, which is why Lyft claims lean harder on the record built in each individual case.

The bellwether trials

With thousands of cases, nobody can try them all. Instead a handful are selected as bellwethers and tried first, so both sides can see how juries actually react before negotiating everything else. If that negotiation produces an aggregate settlement, how settlements are actually paid becomes a separate process with its own timeline.

The common carrier fight

This is the part of the Uber litigation that matters beyond Uber.

A common carrier is a business that holds itself out to transport the public for hire. Trains, buses, airlines, and taxis are common carriers, and the law has treated them differently for well over a century. Two consequences follow.

First, a common carrier owes passengers the highest duty of care, not merely ordinary reasonable care. Second, and this is the one Uber is fighting, that duty is non-delegable. A common carrier cannot discharge its obligation by handing the job to someone else and pointing at them when it goes wrong.

Uber’s entire liability architecture depends on the driver being an independent contractor. If Uber is a common carrier with a non-delegable duty, that architecture does not work: the classification of the driver becomes largely irrelevant to Uber’s responsibility for what happens to a passenger it placed in that car.

Arbitration and the 2021 federal law

For years, the first obstacle in almost any claim against a large consumer platform was the arbitration clause buried in its terms of service. Arbitration is private, individual, and generally far less favorable to claimants than a jury trial.

The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 changed that specifically for this category of case. It gives a person asserting a sexual assault or sexual harassment claim the right to reject a pre-dispute arbitration agreement and proceed in court. It is one of the most consequential procedural developments for survivors in decades, and it is a substantial part of why litigation against platforms became viable at this scale.

What evidence exists in a rideshare case

Survivors frequently assume that without a police report there is nothing. Rideshare cases are, in evidentiary terms, unusually well documented, because the platform recorded almost everything. Whether to report is a separate decision from whether you have a claim.

Questions we are asked most