11/06/2025
How Uber Is Using RICO to Intimidate Injury Victims and Their Lawyers
You’re in the back of an Uber moving through downtown LA when the driver brakes hard and another car hits from behind. Your neck tightens, and by the next morning, every movement sends pain down your spine. You reach out to a personal injury lawyer not for a windfall, but to make sure the MRI, the therapy, and the time off work don’t leave you in debt. That’s what California’s $1 million rideshare insurance requirement is meant to provide: real protection for real people.
Then Uber files a 61-page RICO complaint naming law firms, surgeons, and even past clients as part of an “enterprise” designed to defraud them. Suddenly the lawyer who took your case at 2 a.m. is defending a federal racketeering charge, and your medical records are Exhibit A in a lawsuit that could drag on for years.
What Uber Is Actually Claiming
RICO was written to take down mob bosses, not Main Street lawyers. Uber is using its civil version to allege an ongoing criminal enterprise built on three pillars:
Steering – Lawyers send clients to lien-based providers instead of using health insurance.
Inflation – Those providers bill two, three, or ten times the going rate for the same procedure.
Secret Discounts – After settlement, the “inflated” bills get quietly reduced so everyone still gets paid.
Uber says this isn’t zealous advocacy; it’s mail fraud, wire fraud, and bribery rolled into a repeatable playbook. They want triple damages, an injunction, and a public reckoning.
The Two Sides No One Is Saying Out Loud
The Defense Bar’s Quiet Cheer
Insurance giants and self-insured corporations have whispered about “lien mills” for years but rarely funded the war. Uber just wrote the check. If they win, every future demand letter could carry the shadow of a RICO counterclaim.
The Plaintiff Bar’s Real Fear
Most of us have never met the doctors named in these suits. Yet a single loss could brand an entire referral network as “tainted,” freezing legitimate cases while courts sort the signal from the noise. The bigger chill: clients hesitating to sign with any lawyer who advertises on bus benches.
What Changes If Uber Prevails
If Uber wins, the ripple effects will hit both clients and lawyers hard. For injured clients, lower policy limits — already creeping through Sacramento — could mean smaller recoveries even for life-changing injuries. Insurers will likely push faster, low-ball offers, knowing most victims can’t afford a drawn-out fight.
For lawyers, discovery will become a minefield where every email, text, and fee agreement is fair game. Ethical walls around doctor referrals will rise higher than ever, forcing firms to distance themselves from long-trusted providers. High-volume firms could collapse under mounting defense costs, and honest victims may find themselves battling to prove their pain wasn’t “pre-planned.”
The Middle Path No One Is Talking About
Aggressive billing isn’t the same as fraud. A lien is legal; patient choice is sacred. The fix isn’t scorched-earth litigation it’s transparency:
Public rate databases so “usual and customary” isn’t a mystery.
Mandatory disclosure of any post-settlement discount at the time of demand.
Fast-track arbitration for bills over 150 % of Medicare rates.
Let the bad actors lose their licenses, not the passengers who just wanted to get home safely.
Final Thought
I’ve settled Uber cases for grocery clerks with herniated discs and single moms who couldn’t lift their toddlers after whiplash. None of them asked for a windfall; they asked for fairness. RICO is a hammer, and Uber just swung it hard. My job and every ethical PI lawyer’s job is to make sure the nail it hits isn’t the victim.
If you’re hurt in a rideshare crash, call me. We’ll document every ache, bill every treatment at a defensible rate, and fight for the recovery the law still says you deserve before the law changes.
Kyle Wunderli, Wunderli Injury Law / California Personal Injury Attorney
