Say what anyone might about Nevadans for Fair Recovery, but don’t say they aren’t getting what Uber is paying for.

Speaking personally, I’ve seen their petition signature-gatherers at every public event I’ve attended this summer. I saw one of their signature gatherers outside of Silver Age Comic Con. I saw another one of their signature gatherers (or perhaps the same one?) at the Reno Garlic Fest. It was consequently no surprise to learn that one of their signature gatherers was present during a now-infamous Hot August Nights event in Virginia City.

Regarding the video itself, along with the subsequent investigation and arrests of the three former Californians who decided to share their retrograde variety of bigotry with a Black man holding a cell phone camera, there’s surprisingly little to say. 

Although the Constitution frequently protects the right to say bigoted and hateful things, even on camera, it does not protect true threats. Now, I’m not a lawyer, but if the perpetrators did indeed put their hands on a Black man and tell him that they have “a hanging tree” to “hang people like [him],” that seems threatening enough to this layperson to warrant a strong investigation — so it’s no surprise the Storey County Sheriff’s Department has pressed charges. 

That video, however, brings me to something much less straightforward — namely, the petition the gatherer was collecting signatures for in the first place.

As written, the petition seeks to limit the amount of money Nevada attorneys can charge in fees for civil cases. Unsurprisingly, given that the popularity of the legal profession has not improved since Shakespeare suggested the first thing populist rebels might seek to do is “kill all the lawyers,” Nevadans are largely in favor of the measure.

And why not? Don’t personal injury lawyers just rent billboards, soak school boards and take advantage of the injured in their moment of need?

Unlike my fellow colleague who also wrote about this petition this week, I don’t have much experience with the legal profession. 

I am, however, capable of some basic pattern recognition. I bet you are too.

When a woman died of a severe nut allergy at a Disney-owned restaurant, Disney tried to claim that her husband’s agreement to the terms of service offered four years ago when he signed up for a free month of the company’s online streaming entertainment service forfeited him the legal right to take Disney to court. 

Who argued against Disney in defense of the now-dead woman? A lawyer.

When National Public Data, a data broker that resells public records on the internet, was hacked and the personal records of 2.9 billion people were stolen — including full names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and more — did the company immediately notify their victims or otherwise attempt to make them whole? 

As of the writing of this column, no, they have not. To legally compel the company to do what they should have already done by now, attorneys are preparing a class action lawsuit.

These lawyers — the attorneys fighting against Disney, shady data brokers and, for those old enough to remember a certain Julia Roberts movie, polluting public utility companies — need to be paid for their time. They also need to pay for support staff, offices, equipment, the various per-page fees imposed by the judicial branch’s myriad online systems and various software solutions that know full well they’re selling to lawyers and price accordingly.

Crucially, the lawyers and support staff hired by Disney, along with those who will likely be hired by National Public Data if they haven’t been already, are also paid for their time, staff and materials. 

The Nevadans for Fair Recovery petition, however, does nothing to cap the fees those attorneys may collect. Instead, it only proposes a cap to the fees of those attorneys attempting to recover damages, not to the fees of those paid to defend the the interests of those who may have committed damages.

To understand the practical effect of this, imagine if Uber did $50,000 in damages to you — that's roughly the average price of a new car. If the petition passes, you won't be allowed to spend more than 20 percent of the incurred damages, or $10,000, on a lawyer. Uber, on the other hand, would be allowed to spend as much on its legal team as it wants. If the company wanted to spend millions of dollars against you to discourage others from suing the company, it could.

Even so, there is admittedly an information asymmetry between lawyers and their clients, especially when those clients have little experience with the judicial system and are struggling through their injuries. It would consequently not be surprising if a sufficiently large group of former clients chose to organize a grassroots effort to politically apply some discipline against the legal profession — if that was what was actually happening.

What’s happening instead is Uber is bankrolling the entire petition drive — the aforementioned signature-gatherer was even flown in from Houston instead of hired locally. In the two contributions and expenses reports filed by Nevadans for Fair Recovery, the organization reports exactly two donations — one for $4 million from Uber at the end of March and one for $1 million from Uber near the end of June.

This is not the first time Uber has showed up somewhere with a bag full of money and a petition in its pocket. In 2020, Uber, along with several other gig economy companies, raised more than $200 million in 2020 in favor of a ballot measure in California to ensure its drivers would never be classified as employees — even in California, that sum was the most raised to support a ballot initiative in state history.

Why? California had passed a law requiring gig economy companies like Uber to reclassify its workers as employees instead of independent contractors — and to start paying for workers’ compensation, paid family leave and unemployment insurance.

During that petition drive, Uber and its allies claimed they were working on behalf of its drivers. If California didn’t roll back its new requirements, Uber claimed it would need to shut down its services and stop employing drivers in the state. The ballot measure was thus pitched to voters as a compromise — let gig economy employers return to employing Californians as independent contractors and, in return, they’ll start providing additional protections and benefits for app-based workers.

Despite the promises made to voters during the campaign to pass the measure in 2020, however, pay and benefits for the company’s drivers quickly declined, both in California and throughout the country. In the four years since the measure passed, as Forbes reported in January, Uber has found increasingly creative ways to simultaneously raise passenger fares and decrease payments to drivers throughout the country. According to a recent analysis, driver pay per trip in the United States decreased by nearly 12 percent between 2022 and 2023. The company’s take rate, meanwhile — the amount of each fare that goes to the company instead of the driver — increased to over 40 percent.

Now, profitable for the first time in the company’s history, Uber is in Nevada with a plan to re-create the magic it created for itself in California. Once again, it’s all for the drivers, of course — why should greedy “billboard lawyers” take so much settlement money from their clients?

That, however, is the wrong question.

The question we should ask ourselves is why so many lawyers are able to make a healthy living forcing companies like Uber to do the right thing after all other legal avenues have failed — and why companies like Uber might want to spend $5 million (and counting) to see fewer of those lawyers and their injured clients in court.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].