“In reality, Uber’s ballot initiative won’t protect victims, it will muzzle them,” Nora Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford law professor and director of the school’s Center on the Legal Profession, and Brianne Holland-Stergar, from the University of Montana School of Law, wrote in the November op-ed published by The Bee.

But Engstrom, the legal scholar, said that there are better legislative fixes to “medical buildup,” the concept of inflating doctor bills to sweeten a legal settlement. “If the company is worried about medical buildup,” she wrote The Bee in an email, “there are specific and targeted ways to address that problem, short of decimating people’s ability to obtain legal representation.”

Already, Engstrom and Holland-Stergar wrote in their op-ed, many people who would be eligible for compensation for injuries can’t find representation because their case doesn’t look lucrative enough to attract a firm. After a Bee reporter recounted Hanks’ story to her, Engstrom wondered whether a firm would have taken his case for 25%.