A New Jersey couple has been barred from suing Uber following a car crash that left them with life-changing injuries because their daughter agreed to terms & conditions on the UberEats app.
Mercer County residents John and Georgia McGinty filed a lawsuit against the ride-sharing transportation company in February of 2023 after a car accident left Georgia with multiple broken bones, forcing her to take a year off of work, and John in need of a bone graft and surgery for multiple fractures he suffered.
"There are physical scars, mental scars, and I don't think that they will ever really be able to go back to their full capacity that they were at before," says the McGinty's attorney, Mike Shapiro.
The accident, which occurred in March of 2022, was caused by the McGinty's Uber driver running a red light and crashing into the side of another vehicle. The McGintys had been riding in the backseat of the car.
Uber responded to the suit by filing a motion to dismiss the complaint in order to allow both parties to settle the dispute outside of court, which would allow Uber to keep the arbitration process private and save the company money on legal costs.
The company argued that Georgia McGinty agreed to the UberEats terms & conditions on 3 separate occasions.
"You and Uber agree that any dispute, claim or controversy in any way arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the Services at any time... will be settled by binding individual arbitration between you and Uber, and not in a court of law," said the terms.
In response, the McGintys stated that their daughter, who was a minor, was the one to agree to the terms & conditions of the app when she was attempting to order food from her mother's phone.
While a lower court initially sided with the McGintys and denied Uber's motion in November, the company appealed the decision, with the appeals court then ruling in favor of Uber.
"We are horrified at what the court's decision suggests: a large corporation like 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 concerning services unrelated to the one that caused the consumers' injuries," said the McGintys in a statement according to Newser.
They continued: "Here, the content, format, and presentation — dozens of pages on an iPhone screen during a food delivery order — make it impossible that anyone could understand what rights they were potentially waiving or how drastic the consequences could be."
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