Uber’s Brazen Legal Strategy to Quiet Accident Victims

The ride-hailing giant is accusing personal injury lawyers and doctors of a fraudulent racketeering scheme involving injured passengers. It’s an obvious intimidation tactic.

For years, corporations and insurers have complained that America’s personal injury system is overrun with frivolous claims, shady doctors, and greedy lawyers. Now Uber is trying to turn those complaints into federal racketeering cases.

Over the past two years, the ride-hailing company has filed at least four civil RICO lawsuits around the country accusing plaintiffs’ legal firms and medical providers of coordinating to defraud the company by bringing bogus lawsuits with car accident victims. Last month, a judge in Pennsylvania declined to dismiss one of Uber’s complaints at the pleading stage, and the company immediately began citing the ruling in its other pending cases.

Uber’s allegations are serious. If lawyers and doctors knowingly fabricated injuries, falsified medical records, or concealed unlawful kickback arrangements, that conduct should be punished. But Uber’s complaints simply allege coordination, and it is unclear if the company has any actual evidence. Instead, it repeatedly treats ordinary features of the U.S. personal injury system as inherently suspicious, and in doing so it reveals a greater truth about who is afforded the benefit of the doubt in the civil legal system and who is not.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was originally enacted to help combat organized crime, and allows for enhanced criminal charges in cases of racketeering, along with treble damages in civil cases brought by people harmed by racketeering. But over time, civil RICO has evolved into an aggressive weapon for corporations to retaliate against plaintiffs’ lawyers who file claims against them.

One of the clearest examples came in CSX Transportation v. Gilkison, where a railroad company brought a civil RICO suit against a plaintiffs’ firm and medical experts, claiming that they had filed fraudulent asbestos exposure claims against the company. Although CSX identified only 11 supposedly baseless claims out of more than 5,300 handled by the firm, it secured a verdict that was automatically tripled under RICO and exposed the plaintiffs’ firm to potentially millions more in attorneys’ fees and costs before the case ultimately settled.

Uber undoubtedly is hoping for a similar result. Its complaints are filled with allegations that plaintiffs’ lawyers referred clients to........

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