Geller v. Uber: Illinois Closes the App-Agreement Loophole
The Illinois Supreme Court decided Geller v. Uber Technologies, No. 132066, on September 24, 2026, reversing the appellate division and reinstating the trial court's order denying arbitration. Clifford Law Offices represented the surviving family. The theory Uber pressed was familiar: the decedent clicked through a sign-up agreement years earlier, and that click supposedly swept every future claim, including a wrongful death action brought by non-signatory relatives, into private arbitration.
The court rejected that reach. Arbitration clauses bind parties who agreed to them, not heirs asserting an independent statutory claim. The decedent's contractual consent could not be imputed to family members who never signed anything and who are suing under Illinois' wrongful death statute rather than under the rider's own contract rights.
Practical effect: the case returns to circuit court for a public jury trial with full discovery, including whatever internal safety and driver-vetting records Uber would have preferred to litigate behind a confidential arbitrator. Illinois counsel handling TNC injury and death matters should pull this opinion immediately for any pending motion to compel.
Outside Illinois, the ruling is persuasive rather than binding, but it gives plaintiff counsel in every state wrestling with app-agreement arbitration a clean, recently decided citation on the non-signatory issue.
Counsel defending against rideshare arbitration motions in wrongful death matters now have a same-year, high-court opinion squarely on the non-signatory question.
Social Media Addiction MDL: October Bellwether Will Set the Tone for 3,824 Cases
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' Northern District of California MDL-3047 is moving into its highest-stakes phase. A Los Angeles bellwether trial naming Meta's Instagram, Snap's Snapchat, and YouTube is set to open October 28, 2026. The JPML's September 1 docket report put the pending federal case count at 3,824, a figure that keeps climbing ahead of trial.
The bellwether follows a prior individual jury verdict that found Meta and Google liable and awarded a combined $6 million to two plaintiffs. Both companies moved for a new trial. Both motions were denied, which means the verdict stands as a working data point for settlement valuation going into the October trial.
Separately, Meta's $16 billion-plus multistate attorney general settlement, signed August 26, 2026, remains pending federal approval. That figure sits apart from Meta's $567 million payout following a New Mexico state-court trial, currently the largest state-level verdict in this litigation wave.
Firms with inventory in the MDL should treat the October 28 trial as the next real valuation signal, not the state AG settlement, which resolves regulatory exposure rather than individual damages.
The October 28 Los Angeles bellwether, not the pending AG settlement, is the number that should move individual case valuations in this MDL.
New York's Second Department Sends a Mixed Message on Appeal
Three Appellate Division, Second Department rulings this cycle show how unevenly appellate review treats plaintiff verdicts even within the same court. In Bisogno v. Libertella, the panel affirmed liability but exercised remittitur, cutting compensatory damages to $400,000 and punitive damages to $100,000. Large punitive components remain a target on appeal in New York.
In Lubarsky v. City of New York, the gross damages award survived, but the court reduced the City's comparative fault from 80% to 60%, pushing the plaintiff's own share up to 40%. Under CPLR Article 16, that reallocation changes several liability exposure among defendants and shrinks the practical recovery even though the headline verdict stood.
DeFlorio v. County of Nassau went the other way entirely. Both liability and damages in a foot-and-ankle injury case were affirmed outright, with no remittitur and no fault adjustment. Clean appellate affirmances like DeFlorio remain the exception rather than the rule this cycle.
Counsel building New York verdicts with significant punitive exposure or close comparative fault findings should model remittitur risk before closing lien negotiations tied to gross award figures.
New York trial counsel should brief comparative fault and punitive proportionality defensively, because the Second Department is actively trimming both this cycle.
California's Gatekeeping Standard Reaches Into Lien Priority
The California Supreme Court's reaffirmation of trial-court gatekeeping over expert testimony, functionally equivalent to the federal Daubert standard, is not just an evidence ruling. It has a direct line to how medical liens get paid in California, because excluded or weakened expert testimony on causation and future care costs changes the damages pool that Civil Code section 3045 priority rules divide up.
For treating providers and lien-based medical groups working California PI referrals, this matters at intake. If a damages expert's methodology cannot survive a reliability challenge before dispositive motions, the entire future-care component of a settlement or verdict can shrink, and lien recovery shrinks with it regardless of lien priority ranking.
Firms should audit expert disclosures for methodology documentation now, not after a Daubert-style motion is filed. That includes confirming that life-care planners and treating physicians can articulate the basis for cost projections in terms that survive cross-examination on reliability, not just credentials.
Medical providers evaluating referral relationships in California should ask counsel directly how they are vetting expert methodology before accepting lien placement on a given case, since the gatekeeping ruling raises the bar for everyone downstream of the verdict.
California's expert-gatekeeping standard now functions as a pre-filter on the damages pool that section 3045 lien priority ultimately divides.
Rideshare Liability Is Splitting by State, Not Converging
Three rideshare developments from early 2026 show a jurisdictional split hardening rather than resolving. A Phoenix federal jury awarded $8.5 million against Uber on February 5, finding the company liable for a driver's sexual assault of a passenger under an apparent-agency theory, a result that undercuts the independent-contractor defense Uber typically leans on.
The same week, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated 17 Lyft sexual-assault suits into a new federal MDL, signaling that this category of claim is no longer scattered single-plaintiff litigation but coordinated federal exposure.
Florida moved the opposite direction. An appellate court there affirmed summary judgment for Lyft under the state's TNC statutory immunity provision, shielding the company from a comparable claim entirely. Counsel filing rideshare assault claims now face materially different odds depending on venue alone.
Combined with the Illinois arbitration ruling above, the pattern for 2026 is a rideshare liability map that depends heavily on state statute and forum, not on a settled national theory of TNC responsibility.
Rideshare assault and death claims now turn as much on state TNC statute language as on the underlying facts, and venue selection decisions should reflect that split explicitly.
What the Bar Should Track Through Year-End
Four threads converge this quarter: Illinois' arbitration ruling, the October 28 social media bellwether, New York's uneven appellate remittitur pattern, and California's tightened expert standard feeding into lien math. None of these developments resolve neatly into a single rule for plaintiff practice.
Firms with active TNC inventory should flag the Illinois opinion in any pending arbitration briefing this month. Firms with MDL-3047 cases should treat October 28 as the real pricing event, independent of the pending AG settlement figure.
New York counsel should stress-test punitive and comparative fault theories against the Second Department's recent trimming before relying on gross verdict numbers in settlement talks. California firms and their lien partners should get expert methodology audits done before any Daubert-style challenge is filed, not after.
The open question heading into Q4 is whether the Illinois Supreme Court's non-signatory arbitration logic gets picked up by a federal appellate court before the Lyft MDL reaches its own threshold motions, a timing gap that could determine where rideshare assault claims actually get litigated in 2027.
No single ruling this cycle sets uniform rideshare or MDL strategy, which makes forum-specific case intake the deciding factor through year-end.