Liz Kramer

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Liz Kramer current serves as Minnesota's Solicitor General.  Previously, she was a partner at Stinson Leonard Street and the founder of the award-winning blog, ArbitrationNation.

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In a first indication of the Trump Administration’s stance on consumer arbitration, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) this week issued a new proposed rule that rolls back the Obama Administration’s regulation, which precluded pre-dispute arbitration agreements in nursing homes.  (Too many negatives in that sentence… in other words, the Trump Administration wants…

The Federal Arbitration Act has been in effect for nearly 100 years (92, to be precise).  Nevertheless, the First Circuit found two issues of first impression to address this month.  In Oliveira v. New Prime, Inc., 2017 WL 1963461 (1st Cir. May 12, 2017), the court refused to compel arbitration of a class action…

Just as I predicted, SCOTUS reversed the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision in Kindred this morning.  The interesting piece, though, is that the seven member majority went out of its way to cut off some of the “on trend” methods that state courts have been using to avoid arbitration clauses.

The Kentucky decision can be…

It is not uncommon for lenders to exempt small claims actions from their arbitration provisions. The question confronted by the Court of Appeals of Maryland in a recent case was: when a lender opts for small claims court, does that waive any later right to enforce the arbitration clause?  The court’s answer was yes, if…

Demonstrating just how difficult it can be to separate questions about the “formation” of an arbitration agreement from the “validity” of that agreement, the Fifth Circuit found this month that when an argument was applied to two of the parties’ three agreements, it related to their formation, but when the same argument was applied to…

Now that Justice Gorsuch is confirmed and can take the open seat on the Supreme Court, maybe SCOTUS can move forward on the cases about whether employers can make employees waive their right to class actions in an arbitration agreement.  (Btw, here’s a nice SCOTUSblog piece on Gorsuch’s arbitration decisions.)  In the meantime, California’s…

In the past week, the Third Circuit has issued two important decisions on the formation of arbitration agreements.  (Sing it Beyoncé! “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation.”)  In one, a class action was allowed to proceed in court because the defendant did not obtain explicit enough agreement to the arbitration, and in another an…

The New Jersey Supreme Court refused to allow a respondent to benefit from its refusal to pay arbitration fees in Roach v. BM Motoring, LLC, 2017 WL 931430 (NJ March 9, 2017).

First, Ms. Jackson filed a demand for arbitration against a New Jersey car dealership with the AAA.  The parties’ arbitration agreement required the…

Two federal circuit courts of appeals have recently found that documents Samsung included in boxes with consumer products did not effectively create an arbitration agreement.   In both cases, the documents had titles indicating they related to safety and warranty information, and therefore were ruled insufficient to put consumers on notice of any obligation to arbitrate.…