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The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was originally enacted to help combat organized crime, and allows for enhanced criminal charges in cases of racketeering, along with treble damages in civil cases brought by people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 doctors “with whom the firm maintained a close relationship,” that clients were treated on liens instead of using insurance, that attorneys coordinated appointments and care, and that law firms focused on cases involving substantial insurance coverage. Uber presents these examples as telltale signs of corruption. But this is how injury litigation frequently works in a country with a fragmented, privatized health care system built around the financial interests of insurers.
The modern American personal injury system does not exist in a vacuum. It developed alongside a health care system in which private insurance companies responsible for their bottom lines act as gatekeepers for medical care. Every denial of coverage, delayed authorization, narrow provider network, burdensome deductible, or refusal to pay for treatment creates pressure elsewhere in the system. One place that pressure lands is personal injury litigation.
Many injured people cannot easily obtain timely specialty treatment through their ordinary insurance, particularly after an accident where liability is contested and payment remains uncertain. Providers sometimes refuse to take patients whose care may become entangled in litigation. Deductibles and co-pays can be crushing, and some injured people lack meaningful coverage altogether. And of course, insurers themselves are incentivized to deny coverage for all but the most clearly needed treatment. Litigation liens emerged in part as a workaround to this reality, where doctors agree to defer payment until a case resolves when patients otherwise could not afford treatment at all.
That dynamic is even more fraught in cases involving chronic pain and spinal injuries, which appear repeatedly throughout Uber’s complaints. Chronic pain patients already face enormous barriers to receiving consistent treatment and being believed about the severity of their symptoms. Back and neck injuries are notoriously difficult to reduce to objective measurements, particularly when pain persists long after visible trauma heals. Defense lawyers and insurers have spent decades building litigation strategies around casting doubt on pain that cannot be cleanly quantified by scans or lab results.
Uber’s complaints repeatedly portray the decision not to use insurance as evidence of bad faith, but that choice reflects the incentives created by the insurance industry itself. Private insurers have spent decades opposing universal health care and public insurance expansion precisely because such systems would reduce the profitability of private insurance intermediaries. Corporate America helped build a health care system in which access to treatment is unstable, expensive, and deeply adversarial, and now it points to the downstream consequences of that system as evidence of fraud.
The same dynamic shapes the economics of personal injury law itself. Corporations have spent years cultivating the caricature of the greedy ambulance chaser going after easy payouts from sympathetic juries. But contingency-fee plaintiff work only exists because ordinary people generally cannot afford to pay lawyers by the hour while fighting corporations and insurers with effectively unlimited legal resources. Insurance companies and large corporations can spread litigation costs across enormous balance sheets and have access to armies of attorneys, but injured people do not have that luxury. Someone with little income and chronic pain cannot afford to spend huge amounts of money up front to litigate against insurers determined to contest liability, causation, and damages at every stage.
That is why plaintiffs’ lawyers work on contingency. They absorb enormous financial risk up front in exchange for a percentage of any eventual recovery. And because the economics are so precarious, those lawyers frequently have to make hard decisions about which cases are financially viable enough to justify years of litigation against heavily resourced defendants. Uber’s complaints portray that reality—that lawyers prefer cases with meaningful insurance coverage—as though it were evidence of corruption. Really it is just a reflection of the brutal economics of litigating against corporate defendants in the United States.
Corporations’ moral framing of the issue is perverse. They routinely cast plaintiffs’ lawyers—who often accept uncertain income and substantial financial risk in order to represent injured people against institutions with vastly greater resources—as uniquely greedy or unethical. Yet defense-side lawyers at major firms routinely earn salaries and bonuses dwarfing the incomes of plaintiffs’ attorneys, and insurance companies spend enormous sums building litigation strategies explicitly designed to reduce payouts and defeat claims. Meanwhile, corporations maintain vast ecosystems of preferred experts, “independent” medical evaluators, damages consultants, biomechanical engineers, and defense-oriented physicians whose opinions predictably minimize injuries, challenge causation, and reduce payouts.
A recent ProPublica investigation documented how major insurers repeatedly relied on doctors whose reports had been criticized by federal judges for cherry-picking records, disregarding physicians, and issuing unsupported opinions used to deny disability claims. No one suggested that those insurers were operating criminal enterprises, and no corporation is currently facing RICO claims for relying on their trusted experts to contest injuries and reduce liability exposure. But when injured plaintiffs coordinate with lawyers and providers to obtain treatment and pursue claims, corporations increasingly portray the same kinds of relationships as organized fraud.
Even if Uber ultimately loses many of its cases, the lawsuits impose substantial costs on plaintiffs’ firms and send an unmistakable message to attorneys considering aggressive litigation against powerful corporate defendants. As American Tort Reform Association president Tiger Joyce put it, “Companies with sufficient wherewithal may increasingly resort to table-turning RICO lawsuits of their own to punish and deter [alleged] fraud.”
Corporations understand that they do not need to eliminate personal injury litigation outright to reshape the legal landscape in their favor. They simply need to increase the costs of such litigation, thereby reducing the number of lawsuits that plaintiffs’ firms consider to be a reasonable financial risk. The point is to make these lawyers, as well as doctors and even injured clients, think twice before pursuing claims against companies with virtually unlimited litigation resources.
That strategy fits within a broader corporate effort to constrain civil liability. In recent years, corporations have worked to narrow access to the courts and shift power away from ordinary plaintiffs through mandatory arbitration, limits on contingency fees, procedural barriers, and aggressive public campaigns against plaintiffs’ attorneys to make it harder for injured workers, consumers, and other plaintiffs to bring claims at all.
Uber’s RICO lawsuits are merely a more dramatic evolution of the same project of redefining structural inequities in the civil justice and health care systems as evidence of corruption by the people trying to survive them. The lawsuits expose how deeply corporate power shapes whose doctors are treated as legitimate, whose pain is believed, and who is entitled to medical care for harms caused by those same corporations.
