Doe WHBE 3 v. Uber Technologies, Inc.

322 Cal.Rptr.3d 505

Jane DOE WHBE 3, et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants,

v.UBER TECHNOLOGIES, INC., et al., Defendants and Respondents.

A167458, A167709

Court of Appeal, First District, Division 2.

Filed June 24, 2024

Trial Court: San Francisco County Superior Court; Trial Judge: Honorable Ethan Schulman; (San Francisco City & County Super. Ct. No. CJC21005188)

Attorney for Plaintiffs and Appellants, Jane Doe WHBE 3, et al: Alan Charles Dell’Ario, Attorney at Law, Napa; Williams, Hart & Boundas, John Eddie Wilhams, Jr. (pro hac vice), John Boundas (pro hac vice), Brian Abramson (pro hac vice), Margaret Leococke (pro hac vice), Walt Cubberly; Levin Simes, William A. Levin, San Francisco;

Attorney for Defendants and Respondents, Uber Technologies, Inc, et al.: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Kannon K. Shanmugam (pro hac vice), Randall S. Luskey, Robert Atkins (pro hac vice) Kyle Smith (pro hac vice).

Richman, J.

In 2020, plaintiff Jane Doe (later to become identified as Jane Doe WHBE 3) filed suit against Uber Technologies, Inc. and Raiser, LLC, its wholly owned subsidiary (together, Uber) in San Francisco Superior Court for claims arising out of an incident in Hawaii in which Doe alleged she was sexually assaulted by her Uber driver. In 2021, Jane Doe LSA 35 filed a similar suit alleging that she was sexually assaulted by her Uber driver in Texas. Their cases, along with hundreds of others, were eventually coordinated before one coordination trial judge of the San Francisco Superior Court.

Uber moved to stay the cases on the ground of forum non conveniens, and in a comprehensive 21-page order the trial court granted the motions. The trial court subsequently entered the parties’ agreed-upon order applying the ruling to a vast number of "non-California cases," where the alleged incident took place outside California, the alleged assailant resides outside California, and the plaintiffs either were not California residents or became California residents only after the alleged incident. The agreed-upon order stayed the non-California cases and provided for tolling of the statute of limitations.

Plaintiffs appeal both the trial court’s forum non conveniens order and the agreed-upon order applying it to the non-California cases, asserting that the trial court erred in: failing to "ensure that a suitable alternative forum existed for all the affected cases"; failing to require Uber to demonstrate that California was a "seriously inconvenient" forum; failing to begin from the presumption that California was a convenient forum; and failing to "accord the coordination order proper deference." Plaintiffs also assert that Uber’s terms of use require it to honor plaintiffs’ choice of forum. We conclude that none of the claims has merit, and we affirm.

BACKGROUND

Jane Doe WHBE 3, Jane Doe LSA 35, and the Petition for Coordination

On June 8, 2020, Jane Doe WHBE 3¹ filed suit against Uber in San Francisco Superior Court for negligence, fraud, assault, sexual battery, false imprisonment, and other claims. She alleged she was a resident of Fresno County, "grew up in California and is a lifelong California resident," and had been sexually assaulted by her Uber driver in Hawaii on January 13, 2020.

On June 16, 2021, Jane Doe LSA 35² filed a similar complaint in San Francisco Superior Court. She alleged that she was sexually assaulted by an Uber driver in November 2017.

On June 28, 2021, Jane Doe LSA 1, the plaintiff in another case in San Francisco Superior Court, submitted to the Chair of the Judicial Council a petition for coordination, designation as complex, and application for a stay, pursuant to Code of Civil Procedure sections 404 and 404.1.³ The petition alleged that there were 86 similar cases by rape and sexual assault victims pending against Uber in at least five counties, including San Francisco, Kern, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. The petition requested that the cases be designated as complex, that they be coordinated before one judge of the San Francisco Superior Court, and that they be stayed pending the outcome of the petition.

On August 12, the Presiding Judge of the San Francisco Superior Court assigned the Honorable Andrew Y.S. Cheng as the coordination motion judge and set a hearing on the motion for coordination. Uber filed opposition, petitioners a reply, and the motion came on for hearing on November 3, at the conclusion of which Judge Cheng took the matter under submission.⁴

On December 9, Judge Cheng issued a five-page order granting the petition for coordination and request for a stay, and recommending San Francisco Superior Court as the site for the coordinated proceedings. Doing so, Judge Cheng said among other things that "The Court rejects Uber’s arguments that forum non conveniens, choice of law, and liability determinations are unavoidably individualized. Rather, liability questions center on [Uber], not its drivers. Further, while forum non conveniens, choice of law, and interpretation of Uber’s Terms of Use may have individualized components, they address identical threshold and central legal questions that should be decided by one judge."

Uber’s Forum Non Conveniens Motions

On February 2, 2022, the presiding judge of the San Francisco Superior Court assigned the Honorable Ethan Schulman to sit as coordination trial judge and set a case management conference for March 4. In advance of that conference, the parties submitted a joint case management statement noting that after the coordination petition was filed, each side had filed additional notices of add-on covering an additional 430 cases. The joint statement also set forth the parties’ respective positions on how to proceed with the coordinated cases: Uber proposed that Judge Schulman first decide forum non conveniens motions, plaintiffs that the parties proceed to the selection of bellwether cases for trial.

On March 4, Judge Schulman held an initial case management conference, a conference that was recorded. He expressed the view that Uber’s "anticipated motions to stay or dismiss on forum non conveniens grounds represented a threshold matter that [he] should resolve in the first instance," going on to note that the issue will determine "how many of these cases are going to stay" in California and "how many of them will be stayed or dismissed to be refiled … in other [S]tates or indeed other countries." Later in the conference, plaintiffs’ counsel expressed the view that the question of the appropriate forum was "something that the court can weigh and assess in the aggregate," because the court’s decision on a forum non conveniens motion "would apply to all the cases." According to plaintiffs’ counsel, the parties would be able to "litigate this with some level of stipulated facts," and it would not be necessary to "know each and every fact about every case" in order to "resolve the global issue of whether the cases belong [in California] or not." The conference ended with Judge Schulman directing the parties to meet and confer about: "how to group cases" into "categories," forum non conveniens related discovery, and a briefing and hearing schedule on the contemplated forum non conveniens motions.

Another case management conference took place on April 21, in advance of which the parties submitted a joint statement representing that the "parties have agreed that Uber will file motions to stay or dismiss based on forum non conveniens … covering a few categories of cases. Those motions will address categories of cases that Uber contends should be dismissed or stayed pending refiling in an appropriate forum, including cases in which the alleged incident took place in a state other than California, or where the Plaintiff has had a residence outside California at the time of or since the incident (the ‘non-California Cases’)." At the conference, Judge Schulman indicated that "my tentative thinking at this point is I’ll hold the hearing on the forum non conveniens motions and then set a case management conference to be held not too far later after that that would give you enough time, once the dust from that ruling settles, to figure out how it affects how you’re going to handle the rest of the cases."⁵

On August 10, the parties submitted a "Stipulation re: Forum Non Conveniens Discovery and Motions Practice," setting forth procedures for forum non conveniens discovery and a briefing schedule for the motions. In the stipulation the parties acknowledged that Uber’s forum non conveniens motions "will cover only a number of particular cases (consistent with the [p]arties’ case management statement submissions and the colloquy with the Court at the conferences on March 4, 2022 and April 21, 2022)." The parties thus agreed to "meet and confer" after Judge Schulman’s decision on those particular cases to "discuss a process [for] stipulating to or contesting the applicability of the [c]ourt’s ruling … to the remainder of the cases within this coordinated proceeding." And the stipulation concluded with this: "Following resolution of the Forum Motions, which will cover only a number of particular cases (consistent with the Parties’ case management statement submissions and the colloquy with the Court at the conferences on March 4, 2022 and April 21, 2022), the parties shall meet and confer to discuss a process stipulating to or contesting the applicability of the Court’s ruling on the Forum Motions to the remainder of the cases within this coordinated proceeding."

On October 10, Uber filed motions to stay or dismiss two cases—those of Jane Doe LSA 35 and Jane Doe WHBE 3—on the grounds of forum non conveniens. The motions asserted that as of their filing the coordinated proceeding involved some 1,201 plaintiffs, and that "the vast majority—roughly two-thirds of cases with known alleged incident locations—involve incidents that occurred outside California, across at least 50 other jurisdictions in and outside the U.S." The introduction to...