The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that more than 1,600 cases of sexual aggression against Uber may continue before a single Judge of San Francisco, a movement with long -range implications for the application of transport and its cohort in Silicon Valley.
The decision issued on Monday defends a previous decision of a Federal Judges appointed Council to centralize civil demands throughout the country.
The experts said that the litigation is being closely followed by house exchange platforms, dog -walk services and other applications of “independent contractor”, which have also been affected with piles of claims of responsibility of sexual aggression, together with the main competitor of Uber, Lyft.
Uber argued that a four -year clause in the small print of its user agreement prevented the runners from joining any massive demand against the platform.
Hundreds of rape survivors claim that the technological giant slipped into the driver's background verifications, did not report sexual violence to the police and allowed sexual criminals to conduct for the company, all while banking millions in “rider safety rates.”
The Court of Appeals said that the Federal Law triumphs on the agreement of terms of use of Uber, that the American district judge Charles R. Breyer, of the Northern District of California, had previously considered “inapplicable.”
Judge Lucy had Koh wrote in the decision of the Superior Court that 50 years of precedent faced the type of reversion requested by the application of shared trips, without “a single instance” in the registry to justify the blockade of what is known as “centralization.”
“Uber has not convinced us that we should be the first,” the judge wrote.
The experts said the failure marks a legal line in the sand for the agreements that the users of the application must accept before ordering the food to carry, publish a thirst trap, borrow an electronic book or see the results of their laboratory. The long exemptions are inevitable and have become increasingly compensation, experts said.
“Most people do not even read those terms of use,” said Lindsay Nako, executive director of Impact Fund, a group of social justice litigation, but click contracts to access closely control what happens if they are injured.
Uber did not respond to comments requests, but in their appeal to the 9th circuit, the platform lawyers argued that a “non -consolidation clause” in their terms of use was really better for the plaintiffs because he assured that each case was heard for their own merits instead of in a cleaning house procedure.
“The terms of use allow the plaintiffs to have their day in court,” Uber's lawyers wrote. “The plaintiffs simply agreed to do it individually.”
But Nako and others that track the case said that if Uber could easily relax the cases that the government unites, other large companies would write identical provisions in their own terms of use, entangling federal civil courts in endless duplicate demands, which makes victims difficult to charge damage.
When blocking the clause, experts said, the court preserved the rights that most users never realize that they have been asked to give.
“It is a great victory for consumers and a bad day for technology companies,” said Kathryn Kosmides, a defender of helping survivors, an association between victims' defenders and personal injury lawyers. “This last failure establishes a precedent on the security of the application. Many companies are very nervous about what happens [next] in this case.”
In a sense, the ruling is simple: next to the survivors and the panel, the 9th circuit affirmed the right of the Court to administer its own businesses. The combination of similar cases saves money to taxpayers, helps relieve delays in court and avoids decisions to establish precedents that may be in conflict, Koh wrote in their decision.
It is also incredibly common. About 70% of the Federal Civil Action is currently judged as part of a multidistrite case, Breyer estimated.
“It is an amazingly large number,” Nako said on the multidistrict helmet.
The defenders say that discussing a single case in a single court is easier and more cheaper than discussing hundreds in the courts throughout the country. It is also good for the plaintiffs, who largely seek the same sets of documents of the companies they demand.
Consolidated litigation can facilitate the plaintiffs to demonstrate that the errors they allege are systemic, experts said. It is more likely that companies that lose or liquidate such cases have to change the way they operate, instead of simply paying.
Johnson & Johnson was forced to stop using talc in his dust in 2023, after a multidistrite case that unearthed records that showed that he had known that the ingredient caused reproductive cancers for half a century.
A consolidated lawsuit against the Oxycontin Purdue manufacturer, widely considered the engine of the opioid crisis, resulted in the largest prize for damage to the history of the United States.
In the case of Uber, a loss could mean having to reinforce the background verifications, adjust the rules about who can hire to pick up passengers, drivers who were reported for misconduct and install cameras to record each trip, among other changes.
Such changes would be expensive and potentially unpopular. But they are not the only result that the transport application is trying to avoid.
Centralized cases can dig up enormous sticons of evidence that would never be part of the public registry. Uber has been fighting for months to avoid discovery in the northern district of California, while the Court of Appeals weighed if the case could remain there.
“Does Uber want these data that they had about the sexual aggressions that are made public? Demons no! “Kosmides said.
Now that the 9th circuit has rejected its appeal, “there is no incentive to carry this through the discovery and a court with a jury, because ultimately in civil litigation, the discovery becomes public,” he said.
“I think we will see more of the persecuted,” Kosmides said.
