Uber Sued the Lawyers Who Sue It. Two Federal Judges Gave Opposite Answers.

On August 19, 2026, a federal judge in Los Angeles let Uber keep suing the lawyers who sue it. Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett's 85-page order in Uber Technologies v. Downtown LA Law Group refused to let two injury firms, two of their lawyers and a spine surgeon escape Uber's racketeering claims under a doctrine that can protect litigation as petitioning activity. One line in the court's summary of Uber's amended complaint explains what Uber thinks the cases were about: a law firm's referral note stating, "Defendant was an Uber driver and the BI policy limit is 1 million." Five days earlier, in Brooklyn, Judge Orelia E. Merchant dismissed Uber's New York version of the same strategy, and Uber has taken that loss to the Second Circuit.

The referral note

Uber's theory starts with its insurance. According to the amended complaint, as Judge Garnett summarized it, the defendants targeted Uber "because of its statutorily required $1 million insurance coverage, which makes it possible to extract more lucrative settlements." The firms named are Downtown LA Law Group, attorney Igor Fradkin, and the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani with Jacob Emrani himself. The medical defendants are spine surgeon Greg Khounganian and his practice, GSK Spine.

The mechanism Uber pleads runs through medical liens. The firms, Uber alleges, steer clients to pre-selected providers, who treat on a lien against the eventual recovery and bill at inflated rates. Uber alleges the firms then pay those providers far less under side agreements the bills never show. One chart in the complaint, the court noted, showed a patient billed $2,375 for services the provider was paid $300 to perform.

Claimant A shows the pattern Uber describes. On December 9, 2019, an Uber driver struck his car in Los Angeles. The car had minor damage, and he reported no injuries at the scene. A week later, an emergency room diagnosed muscle pain. He retained the Emrani firm, which, according to Uber, authorized a referral to Khounganian and wrote the policy-limit note. According to Uber's amended complaint, Khounganian recommended and performed two spinal surgeries and prepared bills totaling more than $230,000. An independent medical evaluation, Uber alleges, found the surgeries medically unnecessary and the charges ten times accepted norms. Uber settled. None of this has been proven. At this stage, the court must treat Uber's allegations as true.

Why the usual shield did not hold

Lawyers who file suits are ordinarily protected by the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which treats litigation as protected petitioning of the government. The doctrine has a sham exception, and Uber relied on one branch of it: litigation loses its protection when "a party's knowing fraud upon, or its intentional misrepresentations to, the court deprive the litigation of its legitimacy." Uber argued that false statements about injuries, treatment and lien agreements pushed it to settle on worse terms than it otherwise would have. Garnett agreed that was enough for now: "For purposes of a motion to dismiss, this is sufficient to satisfy the third sham litigation exception."

Uber did not win everything in Los Angeles. Garnett dismissed its racketeering conspiracy count, with leave to amend, because the firms are competitors: "Absent factual allegations demonstrating that, despite their status as direct competitors, the Law Firm Defendants reached a mutual agreement to violate RICO, the allegation of a broad conspiracy is implausible." She also ordered fees for Radiance Surgery Center, which won its anti-SLAPP motion: $230,567.25. The Emrani defendants have asked her to reconsider or to certify the ruling for an immediate appeal. That motion was argued September 9 and taken under submission.

Defendant was an Uber driver and the BI policy limit is 1 million.

Brooklyn: seventeen schemes, no enterprise

In New York, Uber sued Wingate, Russotti, Shapiro, Moses and Halperin, two other firms, and two doctors and their practices on January 30, 2025. Uber alleged the firms recruited passengers from "purported or actual minor vehicle collisions" and paid doctors "excessive and/or above-market compensation" for false diagnoses supporting claims of "serious injury," the threshold New York's no-fault law sets for suing over a car accident. Judge Merchant's August 14 order turned on the shape of the operation Uber described: "Uber alleges at least 17 different schemes involving different amalgamations of different Defendants engaged to allegedly defraud Uber in a variety of ways, and each scheme only involves sub-groups of Defendants, never all Defendants."

That, she held, did not plausibly show the common purpose an association-in-fact enterprise requires. Every RICO count fell, the rest on other pleading grounds. The state-law claims were dismissed without prejudice. "We believe this is a wrongly decided opinion," Uber told Insurance Journal. On September 11, Uber filed its notice of appeal.

The split, in dollars and pleading

Analysis: The two orders read two different pleadings. In Los Angeles, Uber tied its theory to 18 lettered claimants, a referral note about policy limits, and billing charts setting the amount billed beside the amount paid. In Brooklyn, the court saw shifting subgroups and no single operation. For a company or insurer weighing the same move, those pleading differences sit between a case that survived the motion to dismiss and one that did not.

Uber has company. The American Tort Reform Foundation, a tort-reform advocacy group, said in its October 6 release that businesses and insurers have filed nearly 300 civil racketeering suits since 2024, a count of such suits generally. On October 4, New York City filed its own racketeering complaint against a plaintiff firm, Asher & Associates, in Manhattan federal court, as the Sentinel reported. The Sentinel has tracked the insurer side of that offense on its RICO scoreboard.

The next rulings will set the price of the strategy. In Brooklyn, Uber filed its notice of appeal on September 11. In Los Angeles, the reconsideration motion had been under submission since September 9 as of the docket's late-September entries, and the parties filed a stipulation on September 28 to extend Uber's time to amend. The referral note is still in the Los Angeles record. For now it is an allegation that survived a motion to dismiss, not evidence a jury has weighed.