California voters will see Initiative #25-0022 on the November 2026 ballot. The title reads: “Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing Act.”
That sounds reasonable. Most people would support protecting accident victims.
But when you read what the initiative actually does, the gap between the marketing and the mechanism becomes clear.
The measure caps attorney fees and case costs at 25% of total recovery. It ties recoverable medical expenses to Medicare and Medi-Cal rates. It restricts relationships between injury lawyers and medical providers. And it applies to every car crash victim in California—not just Uber-related accidents.
Uber is backing this initiative with an estimated $12 million investment.
The marketing says: “We’re protecting victims from self-dealing attorneys.”
The mechanism says: “We’re making it harder for injured people to hire a lawyer and harder for them to recover the true cost of their care.”
The Math That Makes Complex Cases Disappear
Legal experts have pointed out that fee caps function like price controls. And price controls tend to reduce access, not improve it.
Here’s how it works in practice.
A traumatic brain injury case might require $75,000 to $150,000 in costs before trial. You need neurologists, neuropsychologists, life care planners, accident reconstruction experts, depositions, imaging, and testing. These cases are expensive because you’re proving something complex that insurance companies actively try to deny.
Consider a $400,000 case. That’s not a massive case—it’s a typical serious injury claim.
Under a 25% cap on combined fees and costs, you have $100,000 total to work with.
If hard costs are $80,000—completely realistic in a brain injury case—that leaves $20,000 to compensate the attorney for years of work and 100% of the risk.
Remember: contingency attorneys only get paid if they win.
So the attorney is being asked to front $80,000 out of pocket, spend hundreds of hours litigating, take on the risk of losing everything, and potentially earn $20,000 or less.
That’s not a haircut. That’s a non-starter.
No rational attorney can take that case. Not because they don’t care, but because the math doesn’t work.
And the clients who get hurt by this aren’t the big catastrophic cases with eight-figure value. Those will still get picked up.
It’s the middle-class cases that disappear.
The teacher. The construction worker. The rideshare passenger with a real brain injury but a $300,000 to $500,000 case value.
When those cases disappear, those people don’t get “more money in their pocket.” They get no representation. They get lowballed by insurance companies. Or they walk away entirely.
What Happens When Injured People Can’t Find Lawyers
Most of the time, it’s worse than just taking a low offer.
People get forced into a system they don’t understand, against companies that do this every single day.
Some people take whatever the insurance company offers. Those offers are almost always a fraction of what the case is actually worth. We’re talking tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands.
But many people don’t even get that far.
They delay treatment because they don’t know how it’s going to be paid for. Or they stop treatment early because the bills are piling up. And in a brain injury case, that’s devastating—because the medical record is the case. If the treatment isn’t there, the injury becomes easy for the insurance company to dispute.
People try to handle it themselves and get buried in paperwork, recorded statements, and tactics designed to minimize their claim. They say the wrong thing, miss deadlines, or accept liability arguments they don’t even realize they’re conceding.
Then there’s the worst scenario: they walk away entirely.
Not because they weren’t hurt. But because the system became too overwhelming, too confusing, or too stacked against them without legal help.
You’re not just limiting fees. You’re removing the guide, the buffer, and the advocate in a system already tilted toward insurance companies.
The outcome isn’t just a smaller recovery. It’s delayed care, denied claims, and in many cases, no recovery at all.
The Causation Trap
Traumatic brain injuries don’t always show up cleanly on day one. Many cognitive issues—memory problems, executive function issues, personality changes—become more obvious months or even years later.
But the legal system doesn’t work on what eventually becomes clear. It works on what’s documented.
When there’s a gap in treatment—because someone couldn’t afford care or didn’t have guidance—that gap becomes the centerpiece of the defense.
The insurance company will say: “If this person was really injured, why didn’t they treat consistently? Why is there a six-month or one-year gap? Maybe something else caused these symptoms.”
Now you’re fighting an uphill battle on causation.
Even if you bring in top neurologists and neuropsychologists years later, you’re asking them to reconstruct what should have been documented in real time. That’s always harder, always more expensive, and frankly, less persuasive to a jury.
Jurors expect to see a timeline: accident → symptoms → treatment → diagnosis.
When that chain is broken, the defense fills in the gaps with doubt.
Cases where someone clearly had a legitimate brain injury get cut in half in value—or worse, become non-viable altogether—because they delayed treatment early on.
When people don’t have access to legal representation, they don’t get guided into proper care. When they don’t get proper care, they lose the ability to prove what happened to them.
Years later, when the symptoms are undeniable, it’s often too late to connect all the dots in a way that holds up in court.
Medicare Rate-Tying Eliminates Treatment Access
The initiative also restricts medical expenses to Medicare and Medi-Cal rates.
On one side, you have fewer attorneys willing to take cases, which means people don’t have guidance. They don’t know where to go, how to document their injuries, or how to protect their claim.
On the other side, you have doctors being told—through these Medicare-based caps—that they’re going to get paid less than what the care actually costs, especially on a delayed or lien basis.
So what happens? The doctors stop taking those cases.
Now you’ve removed both pillars at the same time: the legal guidance and access to medical care.
The injured person can’t find a lawyer because the case doesn’t make economic sense. They can’t find a doctor because the reimbursement doesn’t make economic sense. They’re left on their own—hurt, confused, and without a clear path forward.
Without treatment, there’s no medical record. Without a medical record, there’s no way to prove the injury. Without proof, the claim either gets denied or severely undervalued.
What you end up with is a system where valid injuries don’t get treated, don’t get documented, and ultimately don’t get compensated.
Meanwhile, the insurance company gets to point to the lack of treatment and say, “See? This person must not have been that hurt.”
The same law that makes it harder to get care is then used as the justification to deny the claim.
It’s not two separate issues. It’s a feedback loop that works against the injured person at every stage.
The Nevada Precedent
This isn’t a new idea. It’s a recycled strategy that didn’t land the way Uber wanted in one state, so now it’s being repackaged and rolled out somewhere bigger.
In January 2025, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously blocked Uber’s similar ballot initiative that would have capped attorney fees at 20%. The court ruled the initiative was “misleading and confusing.” Uber had poured $5 million into qualifying and promoting the measure.
Nevada was the test run. California is the real target.
And the biggest tell is that they expanded it. If this were actually about Uber-specific issues, they would have kept it limited to rideshare cases. But they didn’t. They drafted it to apply to every car crash victim in California.
That’s not accidental. That’s intentional.
This isn’t about fixing a narrow problem. It’s about reshaping the entire system in a way that benefits the people who pay out claims—insurance companies and large corporate defendants.
The pattern is familiar: caps on damages, restrictions on fees, limits on what juries can hear. It’s always framed as consumer protection. It’s always sold as fairness.
But when you follow the incentives, it’s about reducing payouts.
And the way you reduce payouts isn’t by saying, “We’re going to pay injured people less.” That wouldn’t fly. You do it indirectly.
You make cases harder to bring. You make them more expensive to prove. You limit what can be recovered. And you reduce access to attorneys who can actually take the fight.
That’s exactly what this does.
The “75% to Victims” Framing
The initiative’s supporters say victims will receive “at least 75%” of settlements.
That line only matters if there’s a case in the first place.
The framing assumes the case gets brought, the evidence gets developed, the experts get hired, and someone is actually there to fight for that recovery. But this initiative makes all of that less likely.
You can promise someone 75% of something. But if no lawyer can afford to take the case, or no doctor will treat the injury, that “something” turns into zero real fast.
100 percent of zero is still zero.
The question isn’t, “What percentage does the victim get?” The real question is, “Will the victim have a case at all?”
Because without access to representation and care, most people never even make it to the point where that 75% would matter.
The slogan focuses people on how the pie is split while quietly shrinking—or eliminating—the pie altogether.
Asymmetric Resources in the Courtroom
Under this initiative, one side has unlimited resources. The other is operating on a fixed, capped budget.
The defense can hire multiple experts: neurologists, neuropsychologists, biomechanical engineers, life care planners—sometimes two or three per issue. They’ll run independent medical exams, commission surveillance, and spend whatever it takes to poke holes in the claim.
On the plaintiff side, under a 25% cap that includes costs, every decision becomes a tradeoff.
Do I hire the best neurologist or save that money for a life care planner? Do I take one key deposition or three? Do I push this case all the way to trial or settle early because the budget won’t support a full fight?
That’s not strategy. That’s constraint.
Juries don’t see the budget behind the scenes. They just see one side with a deeper, more developed case and assume it’s the more credible one.
Even if the injury is real, even if the client is telling the truth, the presentation becomes uneven.
And in litigation, presentation matters.
The end result is predictable: weaker cases on the plaintiff side, stronger defenses from insurance companies, and outcomes that skew in favor of whoever can afford to spend more.
It’s not just about limiting fees. It’s about limiting the ability to prove your case while the other side faces no such limit.
The Cases That Never Get Filed
The biggest shift with a 25% cap isn’t what happens during the case. It’s what happens before the case is ever filed.
A whole category of cases just doesn’t get taken.
Cases that are valid but expensive. Cases that require real expert work. Cases where the defense is going to push hard.
Those are exactly the cases that disappear.
From the outside, no one sees that. There’s no headline that says, “This case was never filed.”
But inside the industry, that’s where the real impact is felt.
Under the current system, attorneys have flexibility. If a case needs $100,000 in costs to prove—experts, depositions, trial prep—they can make that investment because the upside supports it. If they win, there’s enough recovery to justify the risk.
Change that to a hard 25% cap on fees and costs combined, and that same case becomes a different equation entirely.
Before taking it, attorneys have to estimate: What’s the realistic case value? What will it cost to prove it properly? What’s left over after those costs?
If the numbers don’t work on paper, they can’t take the case. Not because they don’t believe in it, but because they’d be committing to a losing business decision from day one.
When you’re up against a defense that can spend without limits, that threshold gets even higher.
You can’t go into a fight knowing you’ll be outspent and under-resourced with no way to close that gap. That’s not advocacy. That’s setting the client up to lose.
What to Ask Before You Sign
Signature gatherers are out right now at grocery stores and public spaces collecting names.
Before you sign, ask yourself one question:
If you or your family member were seriously injured tomorrow, would you want a lawyer to be able to fully invest in your case—or be limited by a cap that might make your case impossible to take?
It’s easy to sign something when it sounds like it’s going after greedy lawyers. That’s the sales pitch.
But this isn’t about lawyers. It’s about whether you’ll have someone in your corner when everything is on the line.
Most people signing that petition aren’t thinking about brain injuries, long-term care, or fighting an insurance company with unlimited resources.
They’re thinking, “This sounds fair.”
But fairness isn’t a slogan. It’s a system.
And this changes that system in a way most people won’t understand until they need it.
Before you sign it, pause and ask: Would this help me if I were the one who got hurt?
Because that’s the only question that actually matters.
Who Gets Held Accountable
When you look at this initiative through a prosecutorial lens—through the eyes of someone trying to hold parties accountable—a pattern emerges.
The injured person faces restrictions on legal representation. They face restrictions on medical care access. They face restrictions on what can be recovered.
The corporate defendant faces no such restrictions. They can spend unlimited amounts on defense. They can hire as many experts as they want. They can litigate as aggressively as their budget allows.
This isn’t about creating a more fair system. It’s about creating a more favorable system—for one side.
The initiative applies to all car crash victims in California. Not just Uber cases. Every motor vehicle accident in the state.
That tells you this isn’t about addressing a specific problem with rideshare litigation. It’s about establishing California precedent for nationwide liability reform.
If successful in California, similar measures will likely appear in other states, using California’s passage as validation for expansion.
The title says “Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing.”
The mechanism protects corporate defendants from accountability.
That’s the gap between the marketing and what actually happens.
And that gap is the entire story.