Choice Of Law Provisions And Class Actions

Picture this: you're enjoying a lovely evening with friends inside a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Brooklyn. As the evening is winding down, the clouds open up and give way to a torrential down-pour. You think to yourself, "How am I possibly going to hail a cab in this weather...and in Brooklyn of all places."

Luckily, you remembered, you downloaded Uber, the mobile application that connects you with a personal driver. Within minutes, you receive a notification that your driver is outside waiting for you!

What does this vignette have to do with wage and hour recent developments and highlights?

Earlier this month, a California judge held that out-of-state drivers for Uber Technologies Inc. could not participate in a putative class action that alleged the company violated various California laws, despite a choice of law provision in their licensing agreement with Uber that designated California as the governing law.

Uber drivers in 3 states: California, Georgia and Washington brought a class action suit against Uber claiming it violated CA law by falsely advertising that customers did not need to tip drivers since a gratuity is included in the total cost of the service. The drivers claimed that Uber did not in fact provide the full gratuity to drivers. The second part of the claim was that Uber misclassified them as independent contractors instead of employees.

Uber sought to dismiss the claims as they applied to drivers who both lived and worked outside of California arguing that CA law applied nationwide because the relevant state laws did not include geographical...