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Date: 06-24-2024
Case Style:
Janes Doe WHBE3, et al. v. Uber Technologies, Inc., et al.
Case Number: CJCV21005188
Judge:
Court: Superior Court, San Francisco County, California
Plaintiff's Attorney:
Defendant's Attorney: Kannon K. Shanmugam, Randall S. Luckey, Robert Atkins, Kyle Smith
Description:
San Francisco, California personal injury lawyers represented the Plaintiff who sued on negligence theories.
In 2020, plaintiff Jane Doe (later to become identified as Jane Doe WHBE 3) filed suit against Uber Technologies, Inc. and Raiser, LLC, its wholly owned subsidiary (together, Uber) in San Francisco Superior Court for claims arising out of an incident in Hawaii in which Doe alleged she was sexually assaulted by her Uber driver. In 2021, Jane Doe LSA 35 filed a similar suit alleging that she was sexually assaulted by her Uber driver in Texas. Their cases, along with hundreds of others, were eventually coordinated before one coordination trial judge of the San Francisco Superior Court.
Uber moved to stay the cases on the ground of forum non conveniens, and in a comprehensive 21-page order the trial court granted the motions. The trial court subsequently entered the parties’ agreed-upon order applying the ruling to a vast number of “non-California cases,” where the alleged incident took place outside California, the alleged assailant resides outside California, and the plaintiffs either were not California residents or became California residents only after the alleged incident.
Outcome: Plaintiffs appeal both the trial court’s forum non conveniens order and the agreed-upon order applying it to the non-California cases, asserting that the trial court erred in: failing to “ensure that a suitable alternative forumexisted for all the affected cases”; failing to require Uber to demonstrate that California was a “seriously inconvenient” forum; failing to begin from the presumption that California was a convenient forum; and failing to “accord the coordination order proper deference.” Plaintiffs also assert that Uber’s terms of use require it to honor plaintiffs’ choice of forum. We conclude that none of the claims has merit, and we affirm.
Plaintiff's Experts:
Defendant's Experts:
Comments: