In September 2025, a state court jury in San Francisco gave ride-sharing giant Uber hope that it would be able to beat thousands of state and federal cases brought by passengers who said the company’s drivers sexually assaulted or harassed them.
While the jury unanimously said the company had been negligent in maintaining its safety practices, they agreed that this was not a substantial factor leading to the assault. The case was the first against Uber tried in California and had been selected as a bellwether to test legal arguments for and against the company.
Despite the initial success, the ride has become far bumpier for Uber in the intervening months. In two other bellwether cases, federal juries in Arizona and North Carolina have held against the company. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have adjusted their approach, and, in the Arizona case, scored a multimillion-dollar verdict for a woman who accused a driver of rape.
Uber has said it will appeal the verdicts and has highlighted the fact that plaintiffs have won damages far below what they initially sought. Still, the losses increase the pressure on Uber to settle. And the verdicts are being closely watched by other gig economy players that have long eschewed liability for the actions of independent contractors. That includes Uber’s chief rival, Lyft, which also faces assault-related claims.
Thousands of Cases
In California alone, more than 500 state cases against Uber have been consolidated into a California Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding before Judge Ethan Schulman of San Francisco County Superior Court.
At the federal level, nearly 3,400 cases are pending. In October 2023, the U.S. Judicial Panel for Multidistrict Litigation consolidated and transferred assault cases filed against Uber in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge Charles Bryer is presiding over the consolidated case, In Re: Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, MDL No. 3084.
A master complaint filed in the federal case lays out the primary claims against Uber. Lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that the company has disregarded safety, especially for women, and, in spite of its protestations to the contrary, Uber exercises “extensive control and direction over its drivers.”
Uber has argued that it is a middleman between riders and drivers, who are independent contractors operating their own vehicles. It also has highlighted its background checks of drivers and asserts that 99.9% of its trips occur without incident.
Common Carrier Arguments
In some states, however, Uber’s contention that it is merely connecting passengers and drivers is being put to the test.
In early April, in the federal test case in North Carolina, Judge Breyer found that Uber was a so-called “common carrier” under state law. A common carrier is typically defined as an entity that transports passengers or goods in return for a fee and that is open to the general public.
“Uber clearly qualifies as a common carrier…The undisputed factual record in this litigation demonstrates that Uber holds itself out to the public as a transportation provider through its ubiquitous advertising as well as the control it exerts over Uber rides and the safety of its passengers,” Breyer wrote.
As a result, Uber could not delegate liability to the driver and had a duty to the plaintiff and other riders to transport them safely. “That duty is breached when an Uber driver assaults a passenger—regardless of whether the driver is properly classified as Uber’s employee or an independent contractor under North Carolina law,” Breyer wrote.
The case involved a young woman who hailed an Uber in the early morning hours of March 26, 2019. As she was preparing to exit the vehicle after arriving at her destination in Raleigh, N.C., the driver allegedly grabbed her upper thigh and asked if he could “keep it with him.” The woman fled.
Bellwether Selected by Uber
After a four-day trial, jurors on April 20 found Uber liable for the assault. Pre-trial rulings by Breyer limited the damages to the single 24-hour period surrounding the incident. Jurors were instructed not to consider damages for long-term emotional distress. They awarded the woman $5,000.
In a statement to various news outlets, Uber said "the jury's award here should further bring these cases back to reality, as it represents a tiny fraction of previous demands." AP reported that the company “believes it has strong grounds for appeal because it believes the jury was incorrectly instructed on the question of liability.”
Even with limited damages, the loss at trial was not a positive portent for the company’s defense in the cases ahead, litigation experts said. “This was supposed to be one of Uber’s stronger cases,” Nora Freeman Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies mass litigation, told The New York Times. “If the company could not persuade a jury here, that sends a powerful signal about the risks it faces going forward.”
In a blog post following the verdict, the Philadelphia-based firm Anapol Weiss wrote that the $5,000 figure sets a floor for damages, “not a ceiling.” The firm added, “The jury could not award anything for the lasting emotional impact of what happened…in the years that followed. Most survivors' cases will not be compressed that way.”
An Apparent Agent
After their loss in San Francisco, plaintiffs’ lawyers told legal media outlets that they had learned much from the trial, are recalibrating their arguments, and also using portions of the record as a template to exclude arguments and evidence in later proceedings.
That strategy paid dividends in Arizona, where the first bellwether in federal court was tried. On Feb. 5, a jury found in favor of a plaintiff who said she was raped by an Uber driver during a 2023 trip in Tempe, Ariz. In that case, Jaylynn Dean v. Uber Technologies, Inc., plaintiffs’ lawyers won by convincing jurors that the driver was an “apparent agent” of the company.
Under the apparent agent or authority doctrine, a company can be held liable if a third-party (in this case, the passenger) believes an independent contractor (i.e., the driver) has been given authority to act on the company’s behalf.
Anapol Weiss partner Alexandra Walsh, the co-chair of the plaintiffs’ trial committee in the federal MDL, told Law.com, “The basic question here was whether Ms. Dean reasonably believed that the driver was acting on Uber’s behalf and within the scope of his apparent agency. And the answer was clearly, ‘yes.’ All of Uber’s advertising asks people to ‘ride with Uber,’ to trust ‘Uber’s commitment to safety,’ to ‘take Uber’ when looking for a reliable way home.”
The argument resonated with jurors. “They on their own social media say you’re taking an Uber with your Uber driver,” one juror said after the trial. “I think it’s easy for her to believe that he’s an employee of Uber.”
The jury awarded Dean $8.5 million. However, jurors rejected other claims of negligence and design defects in the Uber app and declined to award punitive damages in the case, in spite of a request by the plaintiffs for overall damages of $140 million.
Uber has said it will appeal the verdict, and as in the North Carolina case, focused its post-trial comments on Breyer’s juror instructions.
Bevy of Lawyers
Uber is being represented in the MDL by Kirkland & Ellis, with a trial team led by Laura Vartain Horn, a partner in the firm’s San Francisco office. Kirkland litigation partners Allison Brown in Philadelphia, Kim Bueno in Austin, Christopher Cox in New York, and Jessica Davidson in New York have been listed in court documents and news accounts. Shook, Hardy & Bacon partners Christopher Cotton in Kansas City and Michael Shortnacy in Los Angeles have also worked on Uber’s defense, according to Law.com.
On the plaintiffs’ side, Sarah London of Girard Sharp in San Francisco, Rachel Abrams of San Francisco’s Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, and Roopal Luhana of Chaffin Luhana in New York are serving as co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the federal MDL, according to court records and news reports.
Anapol Weiss and Los Angeles-based Chang Klein argued in Arizona. The Wagstaff Law Firm, Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger, and Nigh Goldenberg Raso & Vaughn also worked on the case.
Los Angeles-based Taylor & Ring, Sacramento-based Cutter Law, and San Francisco’s Levin Simes were among the law firms representing plaintiffs in the initial California state court bellwether.
Estimating Damages
As for damages in the remaining cases, a number of plaintiffs’ firms are advertising tiers of individual awards ranging from $10,000 to $5 million or more depending on the severity of a victim’s physical and emotional injuries. If those numbers prove accurate, Uber could be on the hook for billions of dollars in damages.
Whether that could push the company toward a global settlement remains unclear. A settlement at this point may be premature given that several more bellwether trials are expected and because of the split result between the state case in California and the federal trials. As Stanford’s Engstrom told the Times, “Bellwethers give both sides — and the public — a chance to see whether the litigation truly has legs.”
The company, as discussed, has said it will appeal its two trial losses. That, too, comes with risk. As one legal analyst told CNN, a loss at the appellate level could give plaintiffs’ lawyers in other cases “a clearer path to victory.”
Tech Under Fire
For other companies that rely heavily on independent contractors, the prospect of Uber losing its liability shield will hardly fill their in-house teams with confidence. Already, Lyft, the other major ride-sharing app, is facing thousands of cases involving sexual assault and harassment by drivers. In February, the U.S. Judicial Panel for Multidistrict Litigation created a new MDL to consolidate Lyft-related claims.
In a March 2026 article, Madeline Batt, a legal fellow at Tech Justice Law Project, noted that the cases against Uber appear to be part of a growing trend. Along with the Uber decisions, a late-March 2026 verdict targeting Facebook and YouTube over social media addiction and another decision holding Meta liable for failing to safeguard young users from child predators, show that “sexual violence cases involving tech companies are increasingly common,” Batt wrote.
While they previously saw cases stall because of statutes aimed at protecting tech companies from lawsuits related to content posted by third parties, litigators are continuing to “refine theories of liability and file cases,” Batt said.
“With both Uber and Meta on trial,” Batt added, “the circumstances in which tech companies will be held responsible for sexual violence and other harms is continuing to take shape.”
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David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times, and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy and creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.