What's Actually Happening Here?
If you've heard noise about rideshare insurance in California and haven't had time to dig in, here's where things stand.
A new law already went into effect. Senate Bill 371 took effect January 1, 2026, and slashed the uninsured and underinsured motorist (UIM) coverage that rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft must carry, from $1 million down to $60,000 per person. That's not a rounding error. For people with serious injuries, it changes the math of an entire case.
A bigger fight is still ahead. Uber is pushing a ballot initiative for November 2026 that would go much further, capping plaintiff attorneys' contingency fees, limiting medical cost recovery, and raising the burden of proof for medical damages in any vehicle accident case in California, not just rideshare. If it passes, it becomes a template for every other state.
Supio brought together two of the sharpest plaintiff-side voices in the country to break it all down: Monica Burneikis, founder and chief trial counsel of Burneikis Law, and Bob Simon, founder of the Simon Law Group, joined CMO Niki Hall for a webinar that was part legal briefing, part call to arms.
Here are the five things you need to take away.
Watch the full webinar on demand →
1. SB 371 Already Happened. The Coverage Drop Is Severe.
The UM/UIM coverage limit for rideshare passengers and drivers went from $1 million to $60,000 per person ($300,000 per incident) overnight on January 1. That's roughly a 94% reduction.
The old $1 million limit wasn't arbitrary. It was put in place in 2014 when rideshare was brand new and legislators recognized that passengers getting into strangers' cars needed meaningful protection. It held for over a decade. Now it's gone.
The timing matters because California's uninsured driver problem is significant. Approximately 17% of California drivers are uninsured, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and as premiums continue rising, experts worry those numbers will climb even higher.
As Monica Burneikis put it in the webinar: a spinal injury case, not even the most severe, can easily run $500,000 or more in medical bills, lost wages, and rehabilitation. A passenger in the back of an Uber hit by an uninsured driver now has a $60,000 ceiling.
The deal behind SB 371 was never about consumer protection. As Bob Simon explained, California's largest labor lobby agreed to the coverage reduction in exchange for Uber allowing drivers to unionize. Two weeks after the deal was signed, Uber announced its autonomous vehicle partnership with NVIDIA. Labor got burned. Injured Californians got a 94% cut in available coverage.
2. The Coverage Gap Creates Immediate Case Evaluation Problems
The practical consequence for PI firms hits at intake.
Before January 1, a rideshare case was relatively straightforward. You knew there was at least $1 million in UM/UIM coverage available, and you could focus on the client's treatment and building the strongest possible case. That confidence is gone.
Now firms need to do what Bob Simon called a "financial responsibility assessment" from the moment a case comes in: who has what coverage, does it stack, what other theories of liability might apply?
Making this harder: most Uber drivers are not high-limit policyholders. Monica Burneikis noted that drivers using rideshare apps are generally doing it to earn extra money, not because they have significant assets to protect. Many passengers don't carry their own auto insurance at all, particularly in urban markets like San Francisco, where car ownership is low.
The strategies the panelists discussed for maximizing recovery in the new environment include pursuing product liability theories, looking for government liability claims where road conditions are a factor, checking whether out-of-state policies (which may stack differently under their own state's law) apply, and exploring umbrella policy riders. None of these replace the coverage that was lost. They're the tools that remain.
3. Uber's Ballot Initiative Would Make Things Much Worse Across All Vehicle Cases
What happened with SB 371 was damaging. What Uber is now pushing through a ballot initiative would be a different order of magnitude.
The proposed constitutional amendment, officially titled the "Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing Act," would require that injured victims in any vehicle crash retain at least 75% of their gross settlement. That sounds consumer-friendly. Here's the problem: the remaining 25% would need to cover all attorney fees, all medical expenses, and all litigation costs.
In real injury cases, a lawyer often has to pay substantial case costs up front, including crash reconstruction, medical experts, depositions, court reporters, imaging, and records retrieval. Force all of that into 25%, and most serious injury cases become economically impossible to pursue.
The initiative also limits how much can be recovered for medical expenses, pegging reimbursement to Medicare (125%) and Medi-Cal (170%) rates rather than actual treatment costs. Providers who treat patients on medical liens may simply stop doing so if they cannot be confident they will be reimbursed.
Critically, the fee restrictions apply only to the plaintiff's side. Corporate defendants and insurers would remain unrestricted, with no caps on what they can spend on defense lawyers, experts, or delay tactics.
As of February, Uber has put about $32.5 million into its effort, according to campaign finance records, while the opposition has committed about $55 million to fight Uber and promote its own competing initiatives. Both sides ran Super Bowl ads in California.
Bob Simon shared he’s taking on several dozen cases where he was over a million dollars in costs before knowing whether he'd win. Under the proposed rules, no plaintiff attorney can absorb that risk for 25% of a recovery, and the clients who need representation and can only pay via contingency are the ones who have the most to lose.
Furthermore, with autonomous vehicles expanding their footprint across the state and country, drivers having lower insurance and the ability to unionize becomes increasingly moot.
4. This Is Not a California-Only Issue
Bob Simon and Monica Burneikis both made this point directly, and it's the one most likely to fly under the radar for firms outside California.
Uber tried a similar initiative in Nevada last year. The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously blocked it, calling the language "misleading and confusing." California is the next attempt, and it will not be the last.
Uber's top executives have told investors during recent earnings calls that they expect lower insurance costs to help drive higher revenue growth, and they have mentioned "legal abuse" and their legislative efforts in different states to drive legal and insurance costs down.
If the California initiative passes, every state becomes a potential target. The ballot language, the messaging, the strategy, all of it becomes a replicable playbook. The fight happening in California right now is the one with the best chance of stopping that pattern before it spreads.
5. There Is a Path to Defeating the Uber Initiative, But the Window Is Short
The Consumer Attorneys of California has put forward a counter-initiative called the Right to Counsel, a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit new laws from interfering with people's right to hire an attorney of their choice.
A California ballot initiative needs 50% +1 votes to pass. Here is the critical mechanic to layer on top: because both Uber's initiative and the Right to Counsel initiative are competing ballot initiatives, if the Right to Counsel initiative receives more votes than Uber's on the November ballot, it cancels Uber's entirely, even if Uber's also passes.
The Right to Counsel initiative needs 874,641 valid signatures, with a verification deadline of June 25, 2026. At roughly $15 per signature, qualifying it for the ballot could cost $30 million just in signature gathering alone.
Monica Burneikis on the urgency: now is the time to mobilize, not after the ballots go out in the fall. The general public barely knows this fight is happening. Lawyers cannot be the loudest voice in it, because Uber is spending to frame this as lawyers protecting their own paychecks. The credible voices are injured victims, medical providers, and labor.
If you are in California, sign the Right to Counsel petition and support signature drives. If you're outside California, pay attention, and start talking to your networks about what's coming.
To get involved: contact CAOC directly, or reach out to Bob Simon on social media. Every signature matters.
Where Supio Stands
In December 2025, Supio made a $100,000 donation to support the opposition effort led by CAOC and the Alliance Against Corporate Abuse. See our announcement here.
The short version: we exist to help attorneys who fight for injured people. A legal system that quietly restricts those firms' ability to operate and reduces justice for victims is not protecting consumers. It's eliminating their options and threatening their ability to recover. Supio is building legal AI solutions that support consumer attorneys, from personal injury to mass torts, deliver the justice that injured and wronged consumers all too often cannot afford.
Watch the Full Webinar
Monica Burneikis and Bob Simon went significantly deeper than this summary, covering specific case strategies, the mechanics of the ballot initiative process, and what firms need to be doing right now regardless of where they practice.
Support CAOC's Fight Directly
Sign the petitions.
CAOC is running signature gathering training sessions. Get in touch with CAOC directly or reach out to Bob Simon on social media to find out how to participate.
Donate.
Contributions of any size help fund both the signature gathering effort and the broader campaign. The next major reporting deadline was March 31, with the signature deadline approaching in late June.
Supio is a legal AI platform built for personal injury and mass tort firms. We help attorneys handle more cases, build stronger demands, and win better outcomes, so they can stay focused on what matters most: their clients.