Legal: Their Uber Driver Crashed. A Pizza Order Unraveled Their Injury Lawsuit.
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A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.
The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.
A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision — which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately — was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.
The car crash left the McGintys severely injured. Ms. McGinty, 51, had cervical and lumbar spine fractures, rib fractures, a protruding hernia and other injuries. She had numerous surgeries and was unable to work for more than a year, until April 2023. Mr. McGinty, 58, suffered a fractured sternum and severe fractures in his left arm and wrist, and has not regained full use of his wrist.
The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.
A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision — which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately — was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.
The car crash left the McGintys severely injured. Ms. McGinty, 51, had cervical and lumbar spine fractures, rib fractures, a protruding hernia and other injuries. She had numerous surgeries and was unable to work for more than a year, until April 2023. Mr. McGinty, 58, suffered a fractured sternum and severe fractures in his left arm and wrist, and has not regained full use of his wrist.
Court: Ordering Pizza on Uber Eats Means You Can’t Sue If Your Uber Driver Puts You in the Hospital
In the American legal system, ordering pizza might mean that in the aftermath of a catastrophic car accident several months later, you’re on your own.
Legal Culturestate courtsBy Madiba K. Dennie October 3, 2024
Georgia and John McGinty suffered life-altering injuries on March 21, 2022, when their Uber driver ran a red light at the intersection of two New Jersey highways and T-boned another vehicle. Georgia broke her neck and fractured her spine and ribs. She sustained a protruding hernia and traumatic injuries to her abdominal wall and pelvic floor, and nearly died at the hospital after experiencing a postoperative infection. John fractured his sternum, left arm, and wrist. Georgia, a family law attorney, couldn’t return to work for over a year, and John still doesn’t have full function of his left hand.
The McGintys sued the company in February 2023, but a few months later, Uber filed a motion arguing that the McGintys had no legal right to do so. According to Uber—and a New Jersey appellate court, which agreed last month—the McGintys gave up their right to sue over the car crash months before it even happened, when they ordered dinner delivery via Uber Eats.
Back in January 2022, while the McGintys were busy packing for a trip, their 12-year-old daughter had used Georgia’s phone to order pizza for the family. After she placed the order, and as the delivery driver was en route, 7,600 words on 17 pages appeared on the screen—a standard “clickwrap agreement,” which refers to the wall of legal text that pops up when you try to do practically anything online. Within that agreement was a binding arbitration clause requiring disputes between the company and the user to be resolved not by a judge or a jury, but by an attorney appointed by Uber. The McGintys’ daughter clicked the checkbox to consent.
In its opinion, the New Jersey appeals court quoted decades-old precedent acknowledging that clickwrap agreements are valid contracts, and that the government has a “strong preference” for enforcing arbitration clauses. The court also pointed out that the agreement’s first paragraph says, in capslock, “PLEASE READ THESE TERMS CAREFULLY, AS THEY CONSTITUTE A LEGAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN YOU AND UBER,” and that the second page “contains a bolded heading entitled Arbitration Agreement in a font size substantially larger than the surrounding text.” The court basically concluded that the fine print wasn’t that fine; because the McGintys got dinner delivered, the legal system says they don’t get a day in court.
Disney Says Disney+ Terms of Service Mean Man Can’t Sue Over His Wife’s Wrongful Death
By Madiba K. DennieThe McGintys were shocked and saddened to learn that a big corporation like Uber could avoid a lawsuit from injured customers because of buried legalese they encountered using unrelated services. As Georgia put it to the BBC, “How would I ever remotely think that my ability to protect my constitutional rights to a trial would be waived by me ordering food?”
Avoiding a lawsuit greatly increases Uber’s odds of avoiding accountability altogether. When consumers are forced to go through arbitration, they typically win less often, and if they do win, they’re awarded significantly lower damages. Arbitration also generally lacks the procedural safeguards available in a court of law, and keeps corporate wrongdoing out of public view. And arbitrators who want repeat business have their own incentives to favor the corporations that bring them in. All of these factors combine to put companies and regular people on even more uneven footing in arbitration than they would be in court.
Uber’s successful argument in the McGintys’ case is just like the argument Disney was shamed out of using over the summer. In May, Disney argued that a man whose wife had died at a Disney theme park could not sue the company for serving her food she was deadly allergic to, thanks to the terms of service he’d accepted when he signed up for a free trial of Disney+ in 2019. Disney withdrew its argument a few months later in response to public outrage, but in light of the New Jersey court’s acceptance of the same argument in this case, corporations in similar circumstances may feel re-empowered to shrug off public condemnation.
The McGintys’ case and the Disney case emphasize how huge companies and corporate consolidation expand the risk of forced arbitration to unforeseeable scenarios. Order a pizza, you may be unable to go to court for a car crash. Try out a streaming platform, you may be unable to go to court for your wife’s death at a theme park. Using any kind of product or service can relinquish your Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial in response to entirely unrelated harm. Uber and courts that agree with them are driving Americans deeper into a dystopian hellscape where the interests of capital always take precedence over the interests of regular people.
Family injured in Uber car wreck forced into arbitration after minor daughter uses Uber Eats
"We are horrified at what the court's decision suggests...Uber can avoid being sued in a court of law by injured consumers because of contractual language buried in a dozen-page-long user agreement."
lawandcrime.com
12 year olds can't sign a contract or agreement legally.
^^^
EXACTLY.
I bring this up whenever these fake internet lawyers try to SHAME hip hop artists especially in the late 80s and 90s for signing sh*t contracts.
While we got THOUSANDS of people RIGHT NOW clicking away ALL their rights SERIOUS rights concerning cell phone activity calls pictures photos and identity and legal arbitration...
for the honor of playing words with friends.
And these same people talking about reading contract agreements .
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from everything I know (not a lawyer but play one on bgol) that aint gonna work. Remember an X can count as a signature.
I would ASSUME that now you open YOURSELF up to civil fraud? Because in court if you DENY you signed it? That is a whole other bucket of trouble.
Their Uber Driver Crashed. A Pizza Order Unraveled Their Injury Lawsuit.
A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when they used the Uber Eats app.
Their Uber Driver Crashed. A Pizza Order Unraveled Their Injury Lawsuit.
A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when they used the Uber Eats app.Listen to this article · 6:19 min Learn more
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Georgia and John McGinty’s efforts to bring their case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza.Credit...Hannah Beier for The New York Times
By Lola Fadulu
Oct. 4, 2024
A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.
The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.
A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision — which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately — was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.
The car crash left the McGintys severely injured. Ms. McGinty, 51, had cervical and lumbar spine fractures, rib fractures, a protruding hernia and other injuries. She had numerous surgeries and was unable to work for more than a year, until April 2023. Mr. McGinty, 58, suffered a fractured sternum and severe fractures in his left arm and wrist, and has not regained full use of his wrist.
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“This happening was like a bomb going off in our life,” Ms. McGinty said, adding that the crash was devastating to “our health, our emotional well-being, our financial well-being” and “our ability to parent our young child.”
Mr. McGinty said, “We’re in constant pain every day.”
They are seeking damages, though their lawyers declined to specify an amount.
According to the decision, the McGintys said in court that on the evening of Jan. 8, 2022, their daughter asked if they could order food while they packed for a ski trip. Uber’s records show that Ms. McGinty logged into her Uber Eats account on her phone and checked a box next to the statement “I have reviewed and agree to the Terms of Use.”
The McGintys said they did not recall seeing a pop-up with the terms-of-use agreement, and asserted that it was actually their daughter who had checked the box before placing the order.
After Uber filed a motion to force arbitration and asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, the lower court denied the request, saying that the agreement presented to Uber Eats users did not clearly explain the difference between arbitration and court.
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But on Sept. 20, the Superior Court of New Jersey’s appellate division reversed that decision. The appeals court argued that arbitration provisions did not always need to have such explicit language, that Ms. McGinty had previously signed agreements from Uber waiving the right to a jury trial and that she had given her daughter the authority to sign the agreement when she handed over her phone.
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The car that the McGintys were riding in at the time of the 2022 crash. They said the crash had “devastated” their health and finances.Credit...Stark and Stark
Ms. McGinty said she and her husband were “really shocked” by the court’s decision.
“We’re incredulous that the court could interpret things the way that they did — that our daughter’s click through to order a pizza some random night could mean that if we were catastrophically injured in a car accident, that we couldn’t recover for our very serious injuries and the financial harm that was done to us,” she said.
They plan to appeal, but because the three-judge panel was unanimous in its decision, they do not have an automatic right to do so, and the path forward could be challenging, said their lawyer, Evan Lide.
“The reality is, nobody reads those agreements and Uber knows that,” Mr. Lide said, arguing that the company had “stolen my clients’ constitutional right to a jury trial.”
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In a statement, Uber referred to the appeals court’s decision, reiterating its argument that Ms. McGinty had already agreed to the terms that included an arbitration provision when she signed up for the Uber app in 2015 and on subsequent occasions.
The company also said that the driver involved in the accident no longer had access to the platform.
The decision comes weeks after Disney backed down from an effort to block a wrongful-death lawsuit by invoking a similar agreement. In that case, a man had sued Disney after his wife suffered a severe allergic reaction and died after eating dishes at a Disney World restaurant that her server had assured her were free of allergens.
Disney initially claimed that he had agreed to arbitration when he signed up for a free trial of the Disney+ streaming service. The company eventually reversed course after a backlash.
Some experts said there were differences between the two cases, largely because there was a clearer connection between the Uber Eats and Uber ride-share apps than between a Disney+ subscription and eating at a restaurant on a Disney World property.
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Courts have historically sided with companies in disputes about arbitration agreements, said Ross B. Intelisano, a lawyer who regularly represents plaintiffs in such cases. Arbitration is typically used to settle complicated business disputes, he said, because it is often cheaper and faster than going to court.
But Mr. Intelisano said these agreements were not always clear or presented in a digestible way.
“Who’s going to read a 14-page arbitration agreement on their phone when they’re ordering Chick-fil-A?” he said.
Ben Farrow, a lawyer who frequently practices arbitration, said he was unsurprised by the appellate court’s decision, given the ubiquity of arbitration clauses.
“Arbitration clauses have been on a steady march for quite some time and they’re more widespread,” Mr. Farrow said, adding that it had become easier for companies to create terms-of-use agreements, and that more people were consenting to them in order to use online services.
He said it was “really only a matter of time before they started to impact people like this.”
There are several reasons people filing lawsuits may prefer to have their cases heard in court rather than handled in arbitration.
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Mr. Intelisano said that juries were more likely than arbitrators to be sympathetic to plaintiffs and to award damages, especially when big companies are involved.
“In a personal-injury case, it’s very important for the plaintiff to be able to tell the story to their peers in the community and have the jury decide whether you win or lose,” he said.