Year In Review

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Pencils down.  (Is the modern equivalent “cursors down”?)  All the attorneys who were drafting new form consumer agreements to comply with the CFPB rule prohibiting class action waivers can now trash those documents.  Pursuant to the Congressional Review Act, the Senate voted 51-50 last night (with the VP as tie-breaker) to nullify the CFPB’s rule.  …

This is my 290th post at ArbitrationNation and today I celebrate six years of blogging.  Woo hoo — that’s longer than most celebrity marriages!  In honor of the occasion, here are updates on six of the hottest issues in arbitration law so far this year.

  1. Agency regulation of arbitration agreements.  On the one hand, the

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I declare this the Summer of Arbitration. It’s not as sexy as the Summer of Love (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, btw http://www.sftravel.com/summer-love-2017), but there has to be some recognition of the avalanche of arbitration cases on my desk (to say nothing of the regulation changes).

Today, I focus on the state…

The CFPB today issued a consumer-friendly rule that is likely to significantly curtail the use of arbitration in consumer financial agreements.  That rule has two major components.  First, it prohibits institutions from relying on arbitration clauses to avoid class actions.  And second, it mandates the submission of redacted data on consumer financial arbitrations that will…

In National Labor Relations Board v. Alternative Entertainment, Inc., No. 16-1385, 2017 WL 2297620 (6th Cir. May 26, 2017), the Sixth Circuit joined the Seventh and Ninth Circuits in upholding the NLRB’s decision that barring an employee from pursuing class action or collective claims violates the NLRA. Already lined up on the other side…

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…

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…

If I had drafted this annual summary post on November 7, 2016, it would have looked different. At that point, the year had produced numerous (final or proposed) federal regulations that significantly restricted the use of arbitration with consumers in large industries.  In addition, Justice Scalia’s death, along with the prospective election of Secretary Clinton,…

Editors of the ABA Journal  have selected ArbitrationNation as one of the top 100 best “blawgs” for a legal audience.  This marks the fifth consecutive year that this blog has made the cut.  (See the full list here.)  It remains the only arbitration blog on the list.

Thank you to everyone who nominated Arbitration…