June 22, 2026
Craig’s note on how to safely find rideshare retainers.
Firms are loading up on rideshare right now, and for good reason: the Uber and Lyft MDLs are moving, and the intake window is wide open.
But there’s a quiet risk in signing rideshare leads. If you can’t say exactly where a claimant came from, they could have come from anywhere, including an offshore coaching ring.
TrustedForm on a landing page is NOT ENOUGH.Those landing page clicks could be coming from an offshore company that is coaching every caller and you’d never know it. You need an agency that will give you full transparency and can actually prove that their traffic is coming direct from Meta.
The safest way to build a rideshare docket is to know that 100% of the traffic is legitimate. That’s why firms work with LegalCalls:
Over the next five emails, our litigation analyst Jeff Keiser walks through how the Uber and Lyft MDLs got here and where they’re headed. We start with the foundation: why the structure of the rideshare model is what makes this litigation different.
~ Craig Alinder
We all know Uber. We all use Lyft. They’ve become so embedded in daily life that they don’t feel like companies in the traditional sense anymore—they feel like infrastructure. You don’t really “decide” to use them so much as you step into a system that already exists. That ease of use is exactly what makes the litigation interesting. The service feels simple; the structure underneath it is not.
The Uber and Lyft multidistrict litigations pending in the Northern District of California consolidate thousands of personal injury and sexual assault claims arising from rides facilitated through the platforms. Plaintiffs’ theory is not classic negligent hiring; it focuses on the idea that the rideshare model itself creates a predictable zone of risk: strangers are matched at scale, in real time, through an algorithm that seeks control over screening, access, and response.
Discovery has focused on the internal mechanics of those systems—background checks, complaint escalation workflows, safety reporting structures, and how prior incidents are tracked and categorized internally. One recurring theme in the record is Uber’s own safety reporting, which acknowledges thousands of reported sexual assault incidents across millions of rides, creating a real basis for plaintiffs’ foreseeability arguments.
The defense is usually trying to keep things tight—narrow the negligence theories, keep the focus on individual incidents, and stop internal safety data from turning into a rejection of how the platform is built. The real concern is aggregation: making sure the case doesn’t drift into something that feels like a system-wide audit rather than a set of specific disputes.
Plaintiffs push the other way. They want the system in the room. That means how complaints move through the pipeline, where escalation thresholds sit, how and when drivers get deactivated, and how prior incidents are recorded and treated internally. The defense position remains consistent: Uber and Lyft are platforms, not custodians, and they do not assume responsibility for independent contractor conduct. On that view, expanding liability based on aggregated third-party acts risks collapsing core tort distinctions between facilitation and control. The question remains more practical: how do juries respond when asked to assign responsibility for harm emerging from a system everyone uses, but no one individually controls?
Next in part 2, we move into motion practice—where the evidentiary boundaries of that question are defined long before any jury hears the case.
Craig H. Alinder, Vice President
Office: 802-664-4201 | Email: craig@legalcalls.com
Legal Calls, 2108 N Street, Suite 4809, Sacramento, CA 95816, (877) 853-5801
