Uber Technologies Inc. has a chance to slam the brakes on a major labor class action that challenges the company's classification of drivers as independent contractors.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it would allow the ride-hailing company to appeal U.S. District Judge Edward Chen's December order certifying a class of approximately 240,000 Uber drivers in California.
The decision is a victory for Uber in a case in which little has gone its way. In a petition to appeal the class-certification order, the company's legal team at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher accused Chen of setting the stage for a "runaway class action" with radical rulings that crippled its arbitration clause.
"[D]istrict courts are not supposed to embark on seek-and-destroy missions in which they resort to inventing creative means of obliterating arbitration agreements," wrote lawyers led by Gibson Dunn's Theodore Boutrous Jr.
Tuesday's development presumably hits "pause" on a trial that had been scheduled for June in the Northern District of California and means that Uber will get a chance to argue that drivers claims should be heard in individual, private arbitration, pursuant to the terms of its driver agreement.
"We are pleased that the Ninth Circuit has granted this petition to review the lower court's order," the company said in an emailed statement.
The decision to take up the appeal was made by Ninth Circuit Judges William Canby, Edward Leavy and Sandra Ikuta. Their one-page order cited the court's 2005 ruling in Chamberlan v. Ford Motor. That case held that class-certification orders should be reviewed only when they sound a "death knell" for the losing party, raise an unsettled issue of law or are "manifestly erroneous."
Also Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit set oral arguments for June 16 in a series of cases challenging Chen's decisions that the arbitration clauses in Uber's driver agreements are not enforceable.
Shannon Liss-Riordan of Lichten & Liss-Riordan, who is representing the plaintiffs in the main driver suit, O'Connor v. Uber, could not immediately be reached for comment.
In a petition opposing the appeal, Liss-Riordan called Uber's objections to Chen's order "histrionic protests" and said the case did not present an unsettled or fundamental issue of class action law.
This story was first published in ALM sister publication The Recorder. The original version appears here.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.