Meyer v. Kalanick

185 F. Supp. 3d 448, 2016 WL 2659591
District Court, S.D. New York·Decided May 9, 2016·No. 15 Civ. 9796·Published·Cited by 4 cases

Opinion

OPINION AND ORDER

JED S. RAKOFF, United States District Judge.

On January 29, 2016, plaintiff Spencer Meyer, on behalf of himself and those similarly situated, filed his First Amended Complaint in this putative class action lawsuit against defendant Travis Kalanick, CEO and co-founder of Uber Technologies Inc. (“Uber”). See First Amended Complaint, Dkt. 26. Plaintiff Meyer alleged that defendant Kalanick, as CEO of Uber and an occasional Uber driver, had conspired with Uber drivers to fix prices through the Uber mobile application (the “Uber app”) in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. See id. ¶¶ 1, 3, 120-40. On March 31, 2016, this Court issued an Opinion and Order denying defendant Kalanick’s motion to dismiss the First Amended Complaint. See Opinion and Order dated March 31, 2016, Dkt. 37. Among much else, the Court found that, contrary to defendant’s contentions, plaintiff Meyer had not, in signing a User Agreement with Uber, waived the right to proceed via class action, nor was plaintiff equitably estopped from pursuing a class action suit against Mr. Kalanick. See id. at 23 n. 8.

On April 14, 2016, defendant Kalanick filed a motion for partial reconsideration of the Court’s Opinion and Order denying his motion to dismiss. See Notice of Motion, Dkt. 40.1 In this motion, defendant Kalan-[451] ick challenges what he describes as a “narrow and discrete issue,” viz,, the Court’s finding that plaintiff Meyer had not waived the right to proceed via class action. See Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendant Travis Kalanick’s Motion for Reconsideration of the Court’s Holding Regarding Plaintiffs Class Action Waiver (“Def. Br.”), Dkt. 41, at 1. Plaintiff filed his opposition to the motion for partial reconsideration on April 21, 2016. See Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Defendant Travis Kalanick’s Motion for Partial Reconsideration of the Court’s March 31, 2016 Opinion and Order (“PI. Opp. Br.”), Dkt. 43. Having reviewed the parties’ papers, the Court, for the reasons stated below, hereby denies defendant’s motion for partial reconsideration and holds that plaintiff may continue to seek to pursue a class action.

By way of background, plaintiff Meyer, in signing-up to use Uber, agreed to Uber’s Terms and Conditions for-users (the “User Agreement”),2 which included the following provision:

Dispute Resolution
You and Company agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating t<? this Agreement or the breach, termination, enforcement, interpretation or validity thereof or the use of the Service or Application (collectively, “Disputes”) will be settled by binding arbitration, except that each party retains the right to bring an individual action in small claims court and the right to seek injunctive or other equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to prevent the. actual or threatened infringement, misappropriation or violation of a party’s copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, patents or other intellectual property rights. You acknowledge and agree that you and Company are each waiving the right to a trial by jury or to participate as a plaintiff or class User in any purported class action or representative proceeding; Further, unless both you and Company otherwise agree in writing, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of any class or representative proceeding. If this specific paragraph is held unenforceable, then the entirety of this “Dispute Resolution” section will be deemed void. Except as provided in the preceding sentence, this “Dispute Resolution” section will survive any termination of this Agreement.

User Agreement at 7-8 (boldface in the original). Defendant Kalanick,. though not himself a signatory to the agreement between plaintiff and Uber, claims that the above-quoted language constitutes plaintiffs waiver of the right to proceed via class action, and that he may lawfully enforce this class action waiver even without seeking to compel arbitration. See Def. Br, at 5. Mr. Kalanick asks the Court to reconsider its ruling to the contrary.

The standard for granting a motion for' reconsideration “is strict, and reconsideration will generally be denied unless the moving party can point to controlling decisions or data that the court overlooked — matters, in other words, that [452] might reasonably be expected to alter the conclusion reached by the court.” Shrader v. CSX Transp. Inc., 70 F.3d 255, 257 (2d Cir.1995). “A motion for reconsideration should be granted only when the [moving party] identifies an intervening change of controlling law, the availability of new evidence, or the need to correct a clear error or prevent manifest injustice.” Kolel Beth Yechiel Mechil of Tartikov, Inc. v. YLL Irrevocable Trust, 729 F.3d 99, 104 (2d Cir.2013) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Here, defendant has not identified any “controlling decision” that the Court overlooked, “intervening change of controlling law,” or “clear error” made by the Court in ruling that plaintiff retained the right to proceed via class action. While defendant’s arguments are not frivolous, no controlling precedent or obvious point of law requires the Court to rule in defendant’s favor. In fact, defendant’s arguments on the motion for partial reconsideration essentially accord with those made, albeit much more briefly, in defendant’s motion to dismiss. This time, however, defendant has expanded its argument and cited several new cases, such as Ulit4Less, Inc. v. FedEx Corp., No. 11-cv-1713, 2015 WL 3916247 (S.D.N.Y. June 25, 2015) and DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia, — U.S. —, 136 S.Ct. 463, 193 L.Ed.2d 365 (Dec. 14, 2015). Defendant’s motion thus fails to comply with the direction that a motion for reconsideration “is not a vehicle for relit-igating old issues, presenting the case under new theories, securing a rehearing on the merits, or otherwise taking a second bite at the apple.” Analytical Surveys, Inc. v. Tonga Partners, L.P., 684 F.3d 36, 52 (2d Cir.2012), as amended (July 13, 2012) (internal quotation marks omitted). On this ground alone, the Court declines to grant defendant’s motion for partial reconsideration.

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Meyer v. Kalanick, 185 F. Supp. 3d 448, 2016 WL 2659591 (S.D.N.Y. 2016).

185 F. Supp. 3d 448 (Meyer v. Kalanick) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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