S.F. jury finds Yellow Cab liable for $8 million crash

A San Francisco Superior Court jury this week found that a Yellow Cab driver was an “ostensible employee,” making the taxi cooperative liable for a car crash allegedly caused by the driver.

Yellow Cab contended that the crash was entirely the driver’s fault and that it bore no legal responsibility because the driver was an independent contractor, according to Todd Emanuel, a Redwood City lawyer who represented the injured passenger, Ida Fua.

“The drivers are in the business, obviously, of transporting the people, and we’re in the business of providing the vehicles and/or the dispatch service, the color scheme,” he said, according to a transcript.

Traffic on southbound Highway 101 came to a dead stop, but the cab driver didn’t notice and struck the vehicle in front of him at 60 to 65 mph, Emanuel said.

Fua was left paralyzed on one side of her body, suffered residual symptoms of traumatic brain injury and is not able to work.

The jury found that the driver was not a Yellow Cab employee, but still was an “ostensible employee,” making the company responsible for his actions.

Uber and Lyft also provide $1 million liability insurance while drivers are carrying passengers or en route to pick them up, and a lesser amount while they are awaiting ride requests.

William Gold, a professor emeritus of law at Stanford Law School, said the case demonstrates “what a thin and sometimes artificial demarcation line there is between these two concepts” of employees and independent contractor.

San Francisco attorney Christopher Dolan is suing Uber over a crash in which an UberX driver who was allegedly awaiting ride requests struck and killed a child in San Francisco.

Tamara Devitt, a labor attorney in Orange County, said the Yellow Cab case sounds like one in which a jury wanted to find for the victim of a horrific crash and that it doesn’t have much relevance for Uber and Lyft.