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.
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
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
Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed the rules that it previewed last fall, following up on its Arbitration Study. Those rules would essentially ban class action waivers from consumer financial agreements, as well as requiring arbitral institutions to provide data on consumer financial disputes to the CFPB. (As an aside, the proposal is
Arbitration case law did not break any new ground in 2015. Instead, a larger sector of the public became aware of the ground already broken in 2011 and 2013, as well as how common arbitration is in professional sports.
Let’s review some of the attention-grabbing arbitration headlines of 2015. There was:
Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has positioned himself as the Boogeyman that financial companies fear this Halloween season. Earlier this month, the CFPB outlined the proposals under consideration for regulating arbitration in the consumer financial industry. The proposals address the availability of class actions — as was widely expected — but
In my last post, I shared some of the highlights from the first half of the new CFPB Arbitration Study. This post covers the second half of the report, with juicy information gleaned from CFPB’s analysis of almost 2,000 actual consumer arbitrations and its comparison of those results to actual consumer court actions.
Arbitration
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released an “Arbitration Study” exceeding 700 pages to Congress this week. You have likely heard the headlines – most commentators assume that the CFPB will use the study to support an effort to restrict or regulate the use of “pre-dispute” arbitration in financial transactions. But, let’s not get ahead of
Say it’s twenty degrees below zero outside, and you’d already seen boiling water turn into “snow” immediately upon making contact with the air, what would you do next? Assuming you were all caught up on your Words With Friends games, you would read the 168-page initial report of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau about arbitration!