The next trial in the federal Uber passenger sexual assault litigation will begin on October 5, 2026, under a scheduling order the court entered on August 24. Jury selection is set for September 30 and a pretrial conference for September 25. The case belongs to one plaintiff and will be tried on her own facts; its outcome decides nothing for the more than four thousand other cases on the docket. It matters for a different reason: bellwether trials are how a multidistrict litigation finds out what its evidence looks like in front of a jury, and the parties have told the court that this one may shape how the next group of cases is selected.
The schedule the court set
The amended scheduling order runs a compressed sequence into the trial date. Fact discovery was to be substantially complete on September 1, with depositions continuing to September 25. Expert reports were due September 3, summary judgment and motions in limine on September 11, oppositions on September 22, and a joint pretrial order on September 24. The pretrial conference is set for September 25 in the Northern District of California, with a second one on September 30 in the Western District of Texas if it is needed.
Each side may file up to 25 pages of motions in limine, the same limit the court set for the earlier Dean trial, and the court’s prior rulings on expert admissibility and on motions in limine carry over. That reuse is the point of centralizing the cases: the second trial does not relitigate the groundwork of the first.
A deposition the court had to order twice
The joint case management statement filed on September 9 describes a dispute that is unusual on paper and ordinary in this case type. The driver in the bellwether case is in county jail. His deposition, set for September 1, was canceled by Uber the night before. The court rejected the justification offered for the cancellation, ordered the deposition to go forward by September 9, and required the parties to file a joint status report each day until it did.
Underneath the scheduling fight sits a substantive question the plaintiff asked the court to resolve before trial: whether Uber intends to contest her account of the assault at all. Uber told the court it expects to answer at the September 25 pretrial conference. How that is answered determines what the trial is about — whether the jury hears a dispute over what happened in the car, or only a dispute over what the company knew and did.
The three cases lined up behind this one
Plaintiffs filed a letter brief on August 21, 2026 proposing the order of the trials that follow. The three cases they put forward were drawn from claims in which the assault was reported to law enforcement, and were chosen to test the negligence theories at the center of the litigation: driver screening and onboarding, background checks, what Uber did with complaints about drivers who had already been reported, and when it deactivated them.
- A July 2025 assault in Wake County, North Carolina, where the driver faces pending criminal charges
- A July 2024 assault in Houston, Texas, where the driver was reportedly arrested and deported
- A January 2025 off-route assault in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a criminal trial set for the fall
The pattern in that list is deliberate. None of these cases depends on the driver being available to answer for what he did. The claim is against the company that matched him with a passenger, and the evidence is the company’s own record of what it knew.
What a bellwether verdict decides
One jury’s answer on one set of facts, and nothing more. A verdict in this case would not be a finding about any other case on the docket, and it would not change the filing deadline that applies to a passenger who has not spoken to anyone yet.
What it would do is give both sides their second read on how this evidence lands, which is why the parties are already arguing about which cases are tried next. The cases behind it are still reviewed one at a time, on their own records.
This article is general information about how these cases work. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and no two claims are alike. If something here sounds like your situation, the useful next step is a conversation about the facts.
