Can Your Uber Agreement Cover a Wrongful Death Claim Over Someone Else’s Ride?

Two accounts and two kinds of claims

Mark and his wife, Gloria Sheridan Geller, had each accepted Uber’s terms of use through their respective individual accounts. After Mark’s death, Sheridan acted as the independent administrator of his estate. The estate sued Uber, its subsidiary Rasier, and the deceased driver, asserting negligence-related claims, claims under the Illinois Survival Act, and wrongful-death claims for Mark’s statutory next of kin.

Uber sought to dismiss or compel arbitration. The company pointed to both account agreements, but the two categories of claim presented different problems.

A survival claim concerns a legal claim that belonged to the injured person and survives death under applicable law. A wrongful-death claim seeks recovery for the loss suffered by qualifying survivors because of the death. The estate’s administrator may pursue both, but that does not make them legally identical.

The trial court directed the estate’s survival claims to arbitration based on Mark’s own agreement. It refused to send the wrongful-death claims to arbitration on the strength of Sheridan’s separate agreement. The estate later voluntarily dismissed the survival claims, a procedural detail that gets lost when the litigation is reduced to a headline about whether Uber can ever demand arbitration.

Uber appealed the denial relating to wrongful death. An intermediate appellate court ruled in the company’s favor on a threshold issue, reasoning that the agreement included a clause assigning the question of arbitrability—the power to decide whether a dispute must be arbitrated—to an arbitrator.

The dispute then reached the state’s highest court.

The word that mattered was ‘your’

Sheridan’s agreement referred to claims connected with the account holder’s use of Uber’s services. Uber argued that its delegation language was sufficient to make an arbitrator decide whether the wrongful-death claims fell within the agreement.

The Supreme Court focused on a prior question: Had Sheridan clearly agreed, in her capacity as beneficiary or estate representative, to let an arbitrator decide whether claims arising from Mark’s ride belonged there?

Reading the agreement in context, the justices concluded she had not. Her assent concerned disputes connected with her personal access to, and use of, Uber. The fatal ride was Mark’s. The wrongful-death claims arose from his death, not a journey Sheridan took using her own account.

The opinion applied the demanding rule that a party must have clearly and unmistakably agreed to delegate this threshold question to an arbitrator. A broadly worded delegation provision was not enough to extend Sheridan’s consent beyond the transactions described in her contract.

The court therefore reversed the intermediate appellate decision and affirmed the Cook County trial court’s refusal to compel arbitration of the wrongful-death claims. It did not need to decide every argument the parties made about unconscionability or other broader attacks on Uber’s terms.

Where the wrongful death claims went next

The court’s decision addressed the wrongful death claims and the agreement Sheridan accepted for her own rides. A separate set of survival claims had initially gone to arbitration under Mark’s agreement before the estate voluntarily dismissed them.

The wrongful death claims returned to Cook County, where the estate still had to establish who was liable for the accident and what damages the family could recover. As of November 10, 2026, a later ruling on the merits of the underlying accident claim was not confirmed from the opinion mirror.

Why whose account booked the ride mattered

Court filings and proceedings are generally public. Arbitration usually takes place in a private forum under the agreement and applicable law. In this case, the Illinois Supreme Court first had to ask whose agreement gave an arbitrator authority over which dispute. Sheridan’s terms covered her use of Uber. The fatal ride came from Mark’s account.

Opinion mirror: Geller v. Uber Technologies, Inc., 2026 IL 132066, opinion filed September 24, 2026.

As of November 10, 2026, an official Illinois Supreme Court opinion or docket URL was not confirmed from that mirror. The mirror citation remains 2026 IL 132066.