More than 2,600 Uber Sexual Harassment and Assault Lawsuits Pending in MDL, California

As the litigation moves forward, Uber is being forced to turn over a trove of documents involving sexual harassment and assault claims against drivers, which has slowed down discovery proceedings.

Lawyers are meeting today with the U.S. District Judge presiding over all federal Uber sexual harassment and assault lawsuits, to discuss the status of discovery and pretrial proceedings in the litigation, which now include thousands of claims spread across the federal MDL and California state courts.

Each of the lawsuits involves similar allegations that passengers were harassed, assaulted and even raped by Uber drivers, indicating that the rideshare company should be held accountable for failing to take appropriate safety precautions that could have prevented sexual predators from targeting passengers on a regular basis.

Given common questions of fact and law raised in the complaints brought throughout the federal court system, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation established an Uber driver sexual assault lawsuit MDL in October 2023, centralizing all claims before U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in the Northern District of California, for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings. However, additional claims have been filed at the state court level in California, where Uber’s headquarters are located.

According to a proposed joint agenda (PDF) submitted in advance of today’s MDL status conference, the parties noted that there are currently 1,000 Uber sexual harassment lawsuits pending in the MDL, with another 1,600 claims filed in California state court. However, the size and scope of the litigation is expected to continue to grow in the coming months and years, as survivors of sexual assault and harassment by Uber drivers come forward to present claims.

Uber Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Status Conference

During the status conference this afternoon, the parties indicate they will address a number of issues, in hopes of continuing to move the litigation forward, including the status of case filings, motions to dismiss, discovery proceedings and the selection of a special master for purposes of working to promote potential Uber sexual assault settlements.

Both sides laid out their positions on those issues in a joint status report (PDF) issued on August 28. In the report, the parties noted that Uber is unlikely to meet a discovery deadline set for the first of September, which called for the rideshare service’s attorneys to substantially complete discovery responses for plaintiffs’ requests for certain documents. Uber indicates it is struggling to meet the massive volume of documents requested, arguing that it has produced nearly half a million pages of documents to date.

As part of the discovery process, plaintiffs have sought access to the underlying data for hundreds of thousands of reported incidents identified by Uber between 2017 and 2020, which were the basis of two separate Safety Reports published by the company in 2019 and 2022. However, the company has resisted turning over all of the information.

In July, U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Cisneros ordered Uber to allow plaintiffs access to data on any safety report that involved sexual harassment, assault or misconduct. However, she blocked plaintiffs from having access to the company’s entire history of incident reports from that time period, indicating that many had nothing to do with passenger safety or sexual misconduct at all.

Both plaintiffs and the Court have noted that the safety reports received by Uber, combined with communications between company executives and document custodians, will help draw a more complete picture of what was happening inside the company while numerous attacks on passengers were being perpetrated on a regular basis.

Following coordinated general discovery in the Uber sexual harassment lawsuits, it is expected that the court will establish a bellwether process where a small group of representative claims will go through case-specific discovery and be prepared for early trial dates, which will be used to gauge how juries are likely to respond to certain evidence and testimony that will be repeated throughout the litigation.

While the outcome of any bellwether trials in the MDL will not be binding on other claims, average Uber sexual assault lawsuit payouts awarded by juries may influence later settlement agreements. If no Uber sexual assault lawsuit settlement is reached, each individual claim may be remanded back to the U.S. District Court where it was originally filed for a future trial date.