The rideshare company Uber is pursuing lawyers in RICO cases against personal injury lawyers more aggressively than anyone in RICO’s history.  All of its cases assert plaintiffs lawyers have conspired with doctors to misdiagnose accident victims in order to increase the severity of claimed injuries and to otherwise submit false evidence in state court personal injury cases.  The predicate acts are the ubiquitous mail and wire fraud statutes, and the enterprises are the collective associations of lawyers, doctors and others who have distinct roles in the schemes.  Uber has retained the large and respected law firm of Ashurst Perkins Coie to represent it, and the firm has written highly detailed complaints which paint a devastating picture of the public’s worst impression of injury lawyers as corrupt, greedy shysters out to milk every dollar they can from Uber’s million dollar per occurrence insurance policies.

The results are mixed.  In one case against Philadelphia lawyer Marc Simon and his law firm the federal court denied the motion to dismiss and allowed the case to proceed over the arguments that state court litigation is subject to the Noerr-Pennington doctrine (constitutional protection for filing lawsuits as a type of “redress of grievances”), meaning Uber should be permitted to try and show that Simon’s cases were “sham” lawsuits “designed solely as a form of harassment.”  In particular, the court believed the allegations that Simon conspired with the doctors to falsify medical records before the cases were filed removes them from Noerr-Pennington immunity as did the the allegation that Simon filed an ongoing “series” of  lawsuits to create settlement pressure on Uber.  And the fact Uber settled the cases was not an impediment to later challenging the settlements via RICO.  The district court also rejected Simon’s arguments that the judicially created doctrines of res judicata (prior litigation) and Rooker-Feldman (federal courts cannot hear appeals from state court judgments) barred Uber’s case which certainly does seek to reopen prior litigation.

In short, the Court indulged all of Uber’s arguments, a tribute to the credibility of the allegations and the quality of Uber’s briefing.  While it is nice to see a plaintiff prevail with a creative RICO theory, Uber will have a tough task in proving that Simon, a highly successful lawyer, engaged in the conduct it alleges.  (Uber Technologies, Inc., v. Simon & Simon, case 25-5365 (E.D. PA)).

Uber also successfully pleaded another similar RICO case against a group of Los Angeles lawyers and doctors.  This decision is notable for holding that Uber’s alleged injury of “increased settlement costs” in state court lawsuits was an adequate pleaded injury.  Prior RICO cases have generally held that similar types of claims injuries are either speculative or intangible.  (Uber Technologies, Inc. v. Downtown LA Law Group, 2026 WL 2448741 (C.D. CA)).

But a third case went spectacularly against Uber and rejected every aspect of its RICO claim: that the doctors and lawyers were an enterprise (holding entry into the enterprise at different times undermined the “common purpose”).  The Court also rejected Uber’s argument that the defendants were engaged in the enterprise’s affairs as opposed to their own affairs.  Here the court went too far and required “control” of the enterprise, which the Supreme Court held was unnecessary in the relevant decision, Reves.

This court took the opposite view of the case and was plainly hostile to Uber.  (Uber Technologies, Inc. v. Wingate, 2026 WL 2364217 (S.D.N.Y.)).

Overall, Uber’s 2-1 record is impressive.   If it can prevail in these cases against the incipient summary judgment motions, it will have finally shown lawyers can be plausibly made targets in RICO.