Hurt in an Uber Someone Else Ordered for You? A New D.C. Ruling Says You Keep Your Day in Court
Someone orders you a car all the time. An adult child books a ride so an elderly parent can get to a doctor's appointment. A friend calls a car for someone who should not be driving home. An office manager sends a car for a visiting client.
You get in. You never downloaded the app. You never made an account. You never agreed to anything.
Then the car crashes and you are catastrophically hurt. Can the rideshare company still force your injury claim out of court and into private arbitration, on the theory that you agreed to its terms by climbing into the back seat?
On August 28, 2026, the federal appeals court in Washington said no. The decision matters to anyone in the District who has ever taken a ride someone else ordered.
What happened
Cheryl Walker had an Uber account and had agreed to Uber's terms of use the ordinary way, by tapping through the app's acceptance screen. Uber lets an account holder order a "guest ride" for someone else, and Cheryl had used that feature six times to send a car for her husband, Carroll.
Carroll never downloaded the Uber app. He never created an account. By his sworn account, he does not read or reply to text messages as a matter of habit. When Cheryl ordered him a car, she simply telephoned him to tell him it was on its way.
On the morning of March 18, 2021, Cheryl ordered Carroll a guest ride. Uber sent Carroll its standard automated text. He did not see it. He got in the car.
According to the complaint, the driver then became distracted by notifications coming through Uber's driver app and confused by the directions the app was giving him. He turned the wrong way down a one way road, into oncoming traffic. In the court's own word, the crash that followed was horrific.
Carroll Walker's injuries required amputation of both of his legs above the knee.
The Walkers sued Uber, claiming the company was responsible both for the driver's negligence and for the way it designed the app that distracted him. Uber did not respond by defending the crash. It responded by trying to move the case out of court, asking a judge to compel arbitration.
You can read the opinion yourself: Walker v. Uber Technologies, Inc., No. 24-7154 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 28, 2026), also available on CourtListener.
Why arbitration was worth fighting about
An arbitration clause is not a technicality. It decides where a seriously injured person's case gets heard and who decides it. Arbitration is private, the proceedings are generally confidential, there is no jury, and appeal rights are extremely narrow. For a catastrophically injured plaintiff, the difference between a public jury trial and a closed arbitration can be the difference in what the case is worth.
Uber's terms of use covered, in so many words, "incidents or accidents resulting in personal injury" connected to using the service. They also purported to bind "third parties, including spouses." So Uber had two arguments. First, that Carroll made his own contract with Uber when he took the ride. Second, that even if he did not, Cheryl's contract reached him anyway.
The trial court rejected both. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Srinivasan joined by Judges Millett and Pan, affirmed.
The holding, in plain English
You cannot be bound by terms you never knew existed. Uber's whole theory rested on the text message it sent Carroll before the ride, which said that taking the trip meant agreeing to Uber's terms and included a link to them. But Uber could not show Carroll ever saw that message. The court's answer was direct: contract law imposes no duty to read a contract that one does not know exists. Because Carroll never saw the message, it did not matter how clearly it was worded.
Sending is not the same as notice. Uber argued that a reasonable person would have read the text, so Carroll should be treated as if he had. The court disagreed. A guest rider's relationship to the service is entirely passive until the car shows up. The court observed that there is no legal duty to constantly monitor your phone for incoming messages that might contain contract terms, and pointed out that Uber had ways to confirm that guests actually received the terms and chose not to use them.
Being someone's spouse does not sign you up. Uber's fallback was that Carroll was a third party beneficiary of Cheryl's contract. The court explained what that doctrine actually does: it lets an intended beneficiary sue to enforce a contract. It does not let a company impose obligations on someone who never agreed to anything. Carroll was not trying to enforce Cheryl's contract. He was bringing ordinary tort claims, grounded in duties Uber owed him under D.C. law, not in any agreement. As the court put it, his claims could equally have been brought if Cheryl had never used Uber at all and he had been hit as a pedestrian.
Equitable estoppel failed for the same reason. You cannot knowingly accept the strings attached to a benefit when you were never told there were any strings.
What this means if you are hurt in a rideshare in D.C.
The practical lesson is that a company's fine print is not self executing. Whether it binds you depends on what you were actually shown and when.
That is worth remembering, because the first thing an injured rideshare passenger often hears is that the matter has to go to arbitration. Sometimes that is right. Often the question is genuinely open, and it turns on details: whose account ordered the ride, what you were shown on your screen, whether you ever clicked anything, and which version of the terms was in effect that day. Those are worth investigating before anyone concedes the point.
Two other things are worth knowing.
First, the driver is usually not the only possible defendant. The Walkers did not just sue over the driver's negligence; they also brought claims about how Uber designed the app the driver was using. Serious rideshare cases frequently involve the driver, the company, another motorist, and more than one insurance policy.
Second, the rules change sharply the moment you cross a state line, and in this region a trip that starts in the District can end in Maryland or Virginia within minutes.
Maryland, D.C., and Virginia: what an injured rideshare passenger faces
| Maryland | District of Columbia | Virginia | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deadline to file an injury lawsuit | 3 years from the injury (Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 5-101) | 3 years from the injury (D.C. Code § 12-301(a)(8)) | 2 years from the injury (Va. Code § 8.01-243(A)) |
| Fault rule that can bar recovery | Contributory negligence; any fault by the injured person can defeat the claim | Contributory negligence, with a limited exception for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-motorized users (D.C. Code § 50-2204.52) that does not cover passengers | Contributory negligence; any fault by the injured person can defeat the claim |
| Minimum liability insurance the statute requires during a prearranged ride | $50,000 per person / $100,000 per accident / $25,000 property damage (Pub. Util. § 10-405) | At least $1 million per occurrence (D.C. Code § 50-301.29c) | At least $1 million (Va. Code § 46.2-2099.52) |
Two notes on that table. The insurance figures are statutory minimums during a prearranged ride, not the coverage actually in force, which is often larger. Maryland's floor is far lower than its neighbors', which makes identifying every available policy especially important there.
You can read the provisions yourself: Md. Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 5-101, Md. Pub. Util. § 10-405, D.C. Code § 12-301, D.C. Code § 50-301.29c, Va. Code § 8.01-243, and Va. Code § 46.2-2099.52.
On fault, all three jurisdictions still follow contributory negligence, one of the harshest rules in the country: a plaintiff even slightly at fault can recover nothing. We cover it across all three in our primer on contributory negligence in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. D.C. has narrowed the rule for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-motorized users, which we explain in our post on the D.C. rule for people hit while walking or biking. That exception does not extend to passengers, so a rideshare rider in the District is still subject to the traditional rule.
One piece of good news for seriously injured people in the District: D.C. places no statutory cap on pain and suffering damages, which we wrote about in our post on why there is no cap on non-economic damages in D.C.
If this happened to you or someone in your family
If you or a loved one suffered a serious injury as a passenger in an Uber or Lyft, and you have been told the claim belongs in arbitration or that a policy will not cover it, that answer deserves a careful look before anyone acts on it. Deadlines run in the meantime, and in Virginia they run faster than most people expect.
Call Posey Lebowitz PLLC at (202) 524-0123, or use our contact form to set up a free consultation.
This is general information, not legal advice about your case.
