First Wrongful-Death Lawsuit Against Uber Ends in Confidential Settlement
Christopher Dolan secured a confidential settlement from Uber in what is widely described as the first wrongful-death suit filed against the company over a driver's conduct, after a New Year's Eve 2013 crosswalk collision in San Francisco killed a 6-year-old girl.
What happened
On the night of December 31, 2013, a family of three was crossing Polk Street at Ellis in San Francisco, walking with the signal at around 8 p.m. A driver named Syed Muzaffar, 57, who was logged into the Uber app and waiting for a fare, turned through the intersection and struck all three. The couple's 6-year-old daughter died of her injuries. Her mother was hospitalized for weeks, and the family's 5-year-old son was hurt as well.
The Liu family retained Christopher Dolan of the Dolan Law Firm. In January 2014 he filed what is widely described as the first wrongful-death lawsuit brought against Uber over the conduct of one of its drivers. He filed in San Francisco Superior Court. Uber's first response was to deny responsibility. The driver carried no passenger when the collision happened, the company argued, so he was not working for Uber, and any claim belonged with his personal auto insurer.
Dolan built the case around how the app actually worked. Muzaffar had the driver app open and was available to accept a ride at the moment of the crash. A driver signed in and looking for fares is doing the company's business, the firm contended, with or without a passenger in the back seat. That argument pressed on a gap in Uber's coverage, which then treated drivers between rides as off duty and uninsured by the company.
In July 2015 the two sides announced a settlement. The amount was not made public, at the family's request that the terms stay confidential. The family said in a statement that nothing would bring their daughter back, and that they were grateful for a legal process that let them resolve the questions raised by her death. Uber said the agreement helped the family move forward.
The dispute changed more than one company's books. A few months after the crash, Uber expanded its insurance to cover drivers who had the app switched on but had not yet accepted a ride. California later passed a law requiring ride-hailing firms to carry $1 million in liability coverage for their drivers. Muzaffar was prosecuted separately and convicted of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter in 2018.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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Related wrongful death verdicts
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A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
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