Shannon Liss-Riordan

When Shannon Liss-Riordan needed better data to support her client’s lawsuit alleging that Uber’s system for riders to rate drivers discriminates based on race, she simply sent out a survey to her other Uber-driving clients. All 20,000 of them.

“I surveyed my own clients to test this theory and found statistically significant impact on drivers of color,” Liss-Riordan said. U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed her complaint anyway.

She argued the appeal at the 9th Circuit in early December. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” she said. Liu v. Uber Technologies, Inc, 22-16507 (9th Circ., filed Oct. 3, 2022).

Liss-Riordan has been representing workers against employers for nearly 25 years, and she’s been a thorn in the side of Uber and other gig-economy companies ever since they started employing drivers as independent contractors. Her law firm has a website dedicated just to its Uber litigation called www.uberlawsuit.com.

She and her firm handle a wide variety of other employment matters, including discrimination, wage-and-hour and tips litigation. But independent-contractor misclassification cases have been “a big part of what we do all along.”

In March, she’ll head to Philadelphia to try the first Uber misclassification case ever to go to trial, she said. It also will be the first trial under federal law to address Uber misclassification. Razak v. Uber Technologies, Inc. 2:16-cv-00573 (E.D. Penn., filed Feb. 4, 2016).

A large portion of her firm’s cases are in Massachusetts, of course. Her lawyers and others won a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court there that kept two initiatives similar to California’s Proposition 22 off the state’s 2022 ballot. El Koussa v. Attorney General, 489 Mass. 823 (Mass. SJC, June 15, 2022).

Lately, however, even more of her work is in California. That’s all due to Elon Musk’s takeover of the former Twitter. “A good part of the year has been taken up with suing Elon Musk for various broken promises,” she said.

The main promise was that laid-off employees would get the same severance package as they would have before. “But then Musk reneged on that when he came in and started immediately laying off,” she said. By now, the company has let go about 80% of its former employees.

That has kept Liss-Riordan busy. “We now have about a dozen class action cases … and almost 2,000 individual arbitrations because Twitter moved to compel arbitration.” Cornet v Twitter, 3:22-cv-06857 (N.D. Cal, filed Nov. 3, 2022).

And the firm has sued the new X for discrimination, WARN Act violations, failure to pay promised bonuses and more.

It has sued also Tesla, but not SpaceX yet, she said.

— Don DeBenedictis