Search results for: CFPB

The Nebraska Supreme Court recently had the unenviable task of determining whether the three month time period that the FAA provides for vacating an arbitration award is a statute of limitation (subject to tolling) or is jurisdictional.  In Karo v. Nau Country Ins. Co., 2017 WL 4185426 (Neb. Sept. 22, 2017), it found that the time periods for both confirming and vacating awards are jurisdictional.

The consequence for the parties in Karo was significant.  The party who lost in arbitration waited four months to bring their petition to vacate the award.  Nevertheless, the district court vacated the award, finding the arbitrator had exceeded his powers and manifestly disregarded the law.  On appeal, however, the state’s high court took up the issue of jurisdiction.  After analyzing the statutory language, it held that “Congress intended that a party’s failure to serve notice of the application…within mandatory time limits would have jurisdictional consequences.”  Therefore, the high court found the district court’s order was void.  [How does that square with the Ninth Circuit finding the three-month period was equitably tolled for five years in this case??!]

In other arbitration news

  • The Supreme Court of Alabama agrees that just because a defendant wins a motion to compel arbitration, it does not obligate that defendant to then initiate the arbitration.  Nation v. Lydmar Revocable Trust, 2017 WL 4215891 (Ala. Sept. 22, 2017).
  • Seeing that the Senate could not be counted on to block the rule, the Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of bankers started a lawsuit challenging the CFPB’s arbitration rule.  (Absent a court injunction or Senate action, that rule takes effect in just over a month.)’
  • SCOTUS heard argument today on the big showdown over whether employees can be forced to waive their rights to class actions.  Coverage by SCOTUSblog here.

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 CFPB issued a rule that will preclude financial institutions from using class action waivers in arbitration agreements.  To understand how “yuge” this is, remember that the CFPB’s initial study showed there are likely over 100 million arbitration agreements impacted by this rule.  (And there does not seem to be the necessary political willpower to stop it.)  On the other hand, agencies headed by Trump appointees have moved to roll back Obama-era consumer-friendly regulations of arbitration agreements in nursing homes and educational institutions.
  2. NLRB.  While the CFPB attacks class action waivers in the financial industry, the NLRB has been attacking those waivers in the employment context, taking the position that such waivers violate the National Labor Relations Act.  A circuit split developed, with the 6th, 7th, and 9th circuits on NLRB’s side, and the 2nd, 5th and 8th circuits siding with the employers.  The Supreme Court will hear arguments on October 2.
  3. Wholly Groundless.  When considering whether to enforce delegation clauses, some federal court have developed a carve-out for claims they think are nothing but hot air.  [Remember delegation clauses are those portions of arbitration agreements that authorize arbitrators to determine even arbitrability — whether the arbitration agreement is valid and encompasses the claims — issues usually decided by courts.]  That carve-out has been called the “wholly groundless” exception, and it is coming up with greater frequency.  Currently there is a circuit split: the 5th, 6th and federal circuits are in favor of spot-checking claims of arbitrability (e.g. Evans v. Building Materials Corp. of Am., 2017 WL 2407857 (Fed. Cir. June 5, 2017)), while the 10th and 11th Circuits believe SCOTUS’s precedent leaves no room for conducting a smell test (e.g. Jones v. Waffle House, Inc., 2017 WL 3381100 (11th Cir. Aug. 7, 2017)).
  4. Formation.  SCOTUS decided the Kindred case in May, confirming that state law on contract formation is also subject to preemption by the Federal Arbitration Act.  That was timely, given that plaintiffs appear to be placing their bets on challenging formation as the most effective way around an arbitration agreement.  They might be right.  See James v. Global Tellink Corp., 852 F.3d 262 (3d Cir. Mar. 29, 2017); Noble v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., 2017 WL 838269 (3d Cir. March 3, 2017); King v. Bryant, 795 S.E.2d 340 (N.C. Jan. 27, 2017).
  5. Small Claims Court.  If a company starts a small claims court action to collect a debt, does that waive the company’s right to compel arbitration years later in response to a suit by the consumer?  This is a question multiple courts are facing, with differing results.  E.g., Cain v. Midland Funding, LLC, 156 A.3d 807 (Md. Mar. 24, 2017) (waiver); Hudson v. Citibank, 387 P.3d 42 (Alaska Dec. 16, 2016) (no waiver); Citibank, N.A. v. Perry, 797 S.E.2d 803 (W. Va. Nov. 10, 2016) (no waiver).  It is important because many consumer arbitration agreements exempt small claims from arbitrable claims, but may reconsider if that is considered a waiver of everything else.
  6. Statutory Preclusion.  The Federal Arbitration Act generally requires courts to enforce arbitration agreements.  But, if there is a contrary congressional command entitling the litigant to a court trial, it can override the FAA.  That issue has already come up multiple times this year, with the FAA generally winning its battles with other statutes.  E.g., McLeod v. General Mills, Inc., 854 F.3d 420 (8th Cir. Apr. 14, 2017).

Thanks to all of you for providing great feedback, leads on cases and topics, client referrals, and a warm community of fellow arbitration geeks.  I look forward to another year of blogging.

Class action arbitration continues to be a hot topic among the federal appellate courts this summer.

The 8th Circuit followed the lead of other circuit courts, finding that courts, not arbitrators, presumptively decide whether the parties’ arbitration agreement allows for class arbitration. Catamaran Corporation v. Towncrest Pharmacy, 2017 WL 3197622 (July 28, 2017).   In support of its decision, the court raised concerns about class arbitration, including loss of confidentiality, due process concerns for absent parties, and a concern about the lack of appellate review.  [Interesting that it didn’t cite any of CFPB’s report on this, but just cited other case law… ] Therefore, unless the parties have “clearly and unmistakably delegated” the class arbitration issue to the arbitrator, a court will decide the issue.  Furthermore, the court said that incorporating the AAA rules is not a clear and unmistakable delegation of the class arbitration decision, even though citing the AAA rules is sufficiently clear in analogous issues in regular “bilateral arbitration.”  The court remanded to the district court to determine whether there was a contractual basis for class arbitration.

Halfway across the country, the 9th Circuit held that employees could bring their claims related to a data breach as a class action in arbitration.  Varela v. Lamps Plus, Inc., 2017 WL 3309944 (Aug. 3, 2017).  The employees had first brought their class claims to federal court, and the employer moved to compel individual arbitration.  The district court found the arbitration agreement was valid, but ambiguous about whether class actions were waived.  Construing that ambiguity against the employer who drafted the agreement, the district court ordered class arbitration.  On appeal, the 9th Circuit affirmed the finding of ambiguity, sending the class to arbitration as a group.  One judge issued a two sentence dissent, noting “we should not allow Varela to enlist us in this palpable evasion of Stolt-Nielsen…”

The “Summer of Arbitration” continues. In this edition, I focus on four big recent cases from the Second Circuit.  One vacated an arbitrator’s certification of a class action.  A second refused to vacate an award, despite an allegation of perjury.  And the last two relate to nearly 1.7 billion dollars worth of international arbitration awards.  (Although I refuse the designation of “flyover country” for my beloved Midwest, I do have to acknowledge that the New York courts get much sexier arbitration cases than we do, and more of them.)

With all the buzz about class action waivers in arbitration clauses (and the CFPB trying to end their use in the financial industry), it is easy to forget that it is possible for class actions to go forward in arbitration.  In Jock v. Sterling Jewelers, Inc., 2017 WL 3127243 (2d Cir. July 24, 2017), the arbitrator certified a class of plaintiffs that included “absent” class members.  The district court concluded that it was “law of the case” that the arbitrator had the necessary authority to do that, based on a 2011 decision from the Second Circuit in the same matter.  However, the Second Circuit found that the district court misunderstood – it had only ruled that the arbitrator had authority to determine whether some class arbitration was permissible – but had not ruled on the question of whether individuals who had not expressly opted into the class could be part of the class.  So, this case goes back to the district court; a continuation of its seven-year class action purgatory.

In another case seeking vacatur, the Second Circuit had the opportunity to clarify when a party’s alleged fraud is sufficient to vacate an arbitration award. It held that for “fraud to be material within the meaning of Section 10(a)(1) of the FAA, petitioner must demonstrate a nexus between the alleged fraud and the decision made by the arbitrators, although petitioner need not demonstrate that the arbitrators would have reached a different result.” Odeon Capital Group, LLC v. Ackerman, __ F.3d__ (2d Cir. July 21, 2017).  In this case, that meant that the employer was not able to vacate the $1.4 M award in favor of the employee, based on the employee’s alleged perjury, because the topic of the perjury had nothing to do with the claim on which he was awarded damages.  (The general damage to his credibility was not sufficient.)

The two cases on international arbitration are better served by a blog focused on that topic. (I read enough cases as it is!  I am sticking with my exclusive arrangement with the FAA.)  But, the executive summary is that the Second Circuit declared that an opposing party deserves personal service of a petition seeking judgment on a $1.6 billion dollar award, not just ex parte proceedings under New York state law. Mobil Cerro Negro, Ltd. V. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 2017 WL 2945603 (2d Cir. July 11, 2017).  It also declared that district courts should grant “significant weight to considerations of international comity” in the rare instance that the winner in arbitration properly confirms a judgment in the U.S., but the award is later nullified (well after the deadline) by courts in another nation, and the loser in arbitration makes a Rule 60 motion to vacate that judgment. Thai-lao Lignite Co. v. Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, __ F.3d__ (July 20, 2017).

It was only a few weeks ago that this blog covered the reversal of the CMS regulation on arbitration in nursing homes.  Now, the Trump Administration has altered course on two other issues of arbitration policy.

First, the Department of Education has “delayed until further notice” its ban on pre-dispute arbitration agreements.  That regulation was final in November of 2016.  The notice cites litigation regarding the rule as the primary reason for the indefinite delay.

Second, the Solicitor General announced it would switch sides in the big SCOTUS showdown over class action waivers in employment agreements.  The administration had previously supported the NLRB, but now will oppose it.

These two actions probably do not bode well for CFPB’s ability to finalize its proposed rule banning pre-dispute regulation and have the rule remain in force…

**Special greetings to new subscribers that signed up after the ABA’s Arbitration Training Institute last week!

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 to ensure that nursing homes can have arbitration agreements in their admission documents.) For context, CMS just issued the regulation it is now retracting in October of 2016.  The 2016 rule applied to any new agreements between residents and long-term care facilities that receive dollars through Medicare or Medicaid, and prohibited the centers from requiring residents to sign arbitration agreements as a condition of admission.  Before the 2016 rule could even take effect, though, its legality was challenged and a federal court stayed implementation of the new regulation during the case. Seven months and a new president later, the agency is changing course.  Why?  The announcement suggests it is for three reasons.  First, because a federal court found merit to the challenges to the rule.  Second, because President Trump’s January 30, 2017 Executive Order “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs” encouraged all agencies to repeal two existing regulations for every new regulation.  And finally, “[u]pon reconsideration, we believe that arbitration agreements are, in fact, advantageous to both providers and beneficiaries because they allow for the expeditious resolution of claims without the costs and expense of litigation.”  Those second and third points could support the roll back of most, if not all, of the Obama Administration’s regulations relating to arbitration. The new proposed CMS rule offers an olive branch to those who lobbied for the 2016 rule.  It proposes to require that arbitration agreements be written in plain language, explained clearly to prospective residents of long term care facilities, and that the resident acknowledge his/her understanding.  The new rule also prohibits any language that would discourage a resident from contacting governmental authorities, and requires facilities to keep copies of arbitration awards for five years (suggesting CMS may request inspection).   The announcement summarizes that the new rule “would . . . strengthen requirements regarding the transparency of arbitration agreements in LTC facilities. This proposal would support the resident’s right to make informed choices about important aspects of his or her health care. In addition, this proposal is consistent with our approach to eliminating unnecessary burden on providers.” If you are curious how other arbitration rules proposed or passed during the Obama Administration have fared so far, Bloomberg BNA has done a great summary of where things stand.  (Short answer: most are on hold.) **Many thanks to Mark Kantor for alerting me to this development.

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, appeared poised to alter the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has voted 5-4 in many of the critical arbitration decisions in the last decade.

As I draft this post on January 4, 2017, it is still true that 2016 produced multiple federal regulations and some significant decisions that move away from the rigid arbitration-enforcement world view that Justice Scalia professed, but the election of Donald Trump, and the opening on the U.S. Supreme Court, may undo those pro-consumer changes.

Here were the big arbitration developments I saw in 2016:

  • The death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. He authored arbitration blockbusters like Buckeye Check Cashing v. Cardegna (2006); Rent-A-Center, West v. Jackson (2010); AT&T Mobility v Concepcion (2011); American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant (2013).
  • Courts created uncertainty for the enforcement of delegation clauses. Enforced in Mohamed v. Uber Technologies, Inc., __ F.3d __, 2016 WL 4651409 (9th Cir. Sept. 7, 2016) and Regions Bank v. Rice, 2016 WL 3031357 (Ala. May 27, 2016). Rejected in Morgan v. Sanford Brown Institute, 2016 WL 3248016 (N.J. June 14, 2016) and Smith v. D.R. Horton, Inc., 2016 WL 3660720 (S.C. July 6, 2016).
  • Courts also created uncertainty regarding who decides availability of class arbitration. Chesapeake Appalachia, LLC v. Scout Petroleum, LLC, 2016 WL 53806 (3d Cir. Jan. 5, 2015) (parties’ incorporation of AAA rules is insufficient to delegate the availability of classwide arbitration to arbitrators); Sandquist v. Lebo Automotive, Inc., 376 P.3d 506 (Cal. July 28, 2016) (arbitrator decides); Dell Web Communities, Inc. v. Carlson, 2016 WL 1178829 (4th Cir. Mar. 28, 2016) (court decides).
  • FAA allows no special treatment for famous athletes. Arbitral awards against Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson, which had been vacated in federal district courts, were un-vacated by federal appellate courts.
  • Finn got under my skinn. The high court in New Hampshire got creative in Finn v. Ballentine Partners, LLC, __ A.3d __, 2016 WL 3268852 (NH June 14, 2016). After finding no avenue for vacating an arbitration award in the FAA, it concluded the FAA’s sections regarding confirming and vacating awards do not apply in state courts and vacated the award under its state arbitration act.  Threw me into a tizzy.
  • 7th Circuit supported NRLB on arbitration. The NLRB has ruled that arbitration agreements which prohibit class actions violate the federal labor laws. But, five federal circuit courts have disagreed with the Board. This year, the 7th Circuit stood up for the Board in Lewis v. Epic Systems Corp., 2016 WL 3029464 (7th Cir. May 26, 2016). Watch for SCOTUS to weigh in on this issue in the near future.

 

  • Agencies engaged in rule-making aimed at eliminating pre-dispute arbitration clauses in many types of contracts.
    • May 2016: CFPB proposed 2 arbitration rules for financial services industry and received almost 13,000 comments in 90 days. The rules would allow financial consumers to participate in class actions in court, even if the governing agreements call for arbitration generally, and would require providers of arbitration services to submit redacted copies of arbitration pleadings to the CFPB for its continuing monitoring. (The rule is rumored to be finalized just before president-elect Trump is inaugurated.)
    • September 2016: the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a rule that will prohibit the use of pre-dispute arbitration agreements in most long term care facilities.
    • October 2016: the Federal Communications Commission indicated that it was developing a proposed rule to address “mandatory arbitration agreements” in contracts between communication service providers and consumers.
    • October 2016: the U.S. Department of Education banned pre-dispute arbitration agreements for all “Direct Loan borrowers.”

Where does that leave us, after this year of significant change? And why do I say the election could undo much of what you just read?

I am no administrative law scholar (this blog is not called RegulationNation, thank goodness), but I do know that these agency rules can be rescinded more easily than an act of Congress or even a precedential holding from SCOTUS. (See http://www.wsj.com/articles/reversing-rule-by-regulation-1479342822.)  I predict the Trump Administration will act to roll back some or all of these regulations. (I have not seen any pronouncements from the President-elect, but base my prediction on my general Spidey sense, as well as Mr. Trump’s motions to compel arbitration in litigation against his companies, and his pro-business positions.)  I also predict that SCOTUS will again become a 5-4 majority in favor of strict enforcement of arbitration clauses.

And what will our feisty state courts do in reaction to more rigid enforcement of arbitration clauses by SCOTUS and federal agencies? I think they will again get creative with their interpretations of state contract laws and even their application of the Federal Arbitration Act in state courts (a la Finn), just like was happening before SCOTUS issued the Concepcion decision. There was less of a reason for the state courts to do that over the past year, as they saw the federal government regulation stepping in.  Watch this blog to see if my predictions are accurate… And feel free to send me your thoughts if you disagree!

 

Within the U.S. Government, the CFPB has gotten most of the attention for trying to regulate consumer arbitration.  But this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are bumping the CFPB out of the arbitration regulation spotlight.  In particular, the CMS issued a rule that will prohibit the use of pre-dispute arbitration agreements in most long term care facilities.

On its blog, the CMS explains the change this way:

The rule makes important changes to strengthen the rights of residents and families in the event that a dispute arises with a facility. Historically, many facilities require residents to agree to binding arbitration clauses when they are admitted to these facilities. These clauses require the resident to settle any dispute that may arise using arbitration rather than the court system. Effective November 28, 2016, our final rule will prohibit the use of pre-dispute binding arbitration agreements. This means that facilities may not require residents to sign pre-dispute arbitration agreements as a condition of admission to that long-term care facility.

The rule applies to all long-term care facilities that participate in the Medicare or Medicaid programs.  The prohibition is in keeping with the recommendation of the American Bar Association.

The rule is also in keeping with the decisions of many state courts, which have largely refused to enforce arbitration agreements in nursing home admission documents.  For example, the Supreme Court of Florida last month found that an admission document signed by the resident’s son did not bind the resident, and therefore claims of negligence and statutory violations could proceed in court.  Mendez v. Hampton Court Nursing Ctr., __ So. 3d __, 2016 WL 5239873 (Fl. Sept. 22, 2016).  The highest courts in Pennsylvania, Alabama, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Oklahoma have also refused to enforce arbitration agreements in recent years, for a variety of reasons.

It will be interesting to see whether CMS’ regulation of arbitration draws the same type of challenge that CFPB’s regulation of arbitration has drawn.

Echoing a holding already issued by four other circuits, the Third Circuit recently found that a defendant does not waive its right to arbitration by continuing to litigate in court, if the reason it failed to move to compel arbitration is that the motion would have been futile.  Chassen v. Fidelity Nat’l Fin., Inc., 2016 WL 4698256 (3d Cir. Sept. 8, 2016).

The case involves a class of real estate purchasers who claim they were overcharged for recording documents in New Jersey.  Although there were arbitration agreements in the relevant contracts, the defendants did not move to compel “bipolar” arbitration for two and a half years.  (Where did that term come from, Third Circuit?  Are we equating individual arbitration to a mental health condition now?)  In that time, plaintiffs served 150 non-party subpoenas and spent $50,000 on experts.

Although defendants did not attempt to explain their inaction, the Court concluded the long delay in seeking arbitration was excused.  In short, New Jersey law had nearly outlawed class action waivers in consumer arbitration clauses, so until SCOTUS decided Concepcion in 2011 (finding California’s similar rule preempted by federal law), it would not have made sense for defendants to compel arbitration.  The court reasoned that unlike in other cases of inaction, the prejudice to plaintiffs “is attributable to a change in the applicable law, not to any negligent action on the part of either party.”  It also noted that futility is a recognized exception to ripeness and administrative exhaustion, two analogous doctrines.

Other than the use of “bipolar,” none of those conclusions strikes me as odd.  But the opinion then plows some new ground.  It finds that a defendant can independently waive individual and class arbitration, because those are “substantively distinct” types of arbitration.  (And it concludes that the defendants here had a valid futility defense for both types.) Finally, the dissent points out a key piece of information: there was no class arbitration waiver in the arbitration clauses at issue.  “These clauses…do not even mention class arbitration, let alone outright prohibit it.” Which the dissent (fairly) characterizes as seriously undercutting the futility analysis.

Now that Concepcion is more than five years old, this type of case is unlikely to come up often in terms of preempted state arbitration law, but the new rules from the CFPB (and legal challenges to those regulations) could make the futility doctrine relevant again.

The American Arbitration Association (AAA) has not released statistics for years (other than to the CFPB). But recently, arbitration geeks got a summer solstice gift of (limited) new information. The piece is only three pages, short enough to read during a commercial break, but here are some key numbers to know:

  • In 2015, 8,360 new business-to-business (B2B) arbitrations were filed. That figure includes commercial cases, construction, and executive employment disputes;
  • The claims and counterclaims made in those B2B arbitrations in 2015 totaled over $16 billion;
  • As a point of comparison, there were 25,024 private contract disputes filed in all the federal courts in the U.S. in the year ending March 2015;
  • The industries with the fastest increasing arbitration caseloads are transportation, commercial insurance, entertainment/media, and pharma/biotech; and
  • 56% of the B2B cases in 2015 were resolved prior to award.

What I take away from this is that there is still a significant percentage of business disputes being resolved in arbitration, and more of them get all the way to an award than is true in court litigation.