A resource for litigators, in-house counsel, and arbitrators
I can’t believe we’re more than a week into August! I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m going to have to say goodbye to summer too soon. I love fall, so maybe that’s not so bad?
Anyway, speaking of farewells, this week we get a back-to-the-basics refresher from the Eleventh Circuit on…
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…
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…
Continuing last week’s theme of “States Gone Wild,” here are three more oddball summer decisions from state supreme courts. All of them find interesting paths around federal case law (IMHO).
Georgia Says Class Complaint Is Deemed Arbitration Opt Out For All Class Members
In Bickerstaff v. SunTrust Bank, 2016 WL 3693778 (Ga. July 8,…
This week, the Fourth Circuit found an arbitration agreement invalid because it waived all federal and state laws. Although two other federal circuit courts had already found the same company’s arbitration agreement unenforceable because it called for an impossible arbitration process, the Fourth Circuit found it invalid for a new reason.
The issue in Hayes…
The issue in analyzing whether a party waived its right to arbitrate is usually whether the defendant waited too long to assert the arbitration obligation. But, this week the Second Circuit had the opportunity to address whether a plaintiff waives its right to arbitrate by the simple fact of bringing a case in court.
In…
Three federal appellate courts recently affirmed lower courts’ refusal to compel arbitration. These cases show that the federal policy favoring arbitration is not absolute – the parties must have agreed to arbitrate the claims at issue and the defendant cannot have waived its right to arbitrate by engaging in significant discovery and motion practice.
In…
The Fifth Circuit un-vacated an arbitration award last week, holding the district court had wrongly concluded that the court was the proper decision-maker on contract formation. Although courts are presumptively authorized to decide whether an arbitration agreement exists, the Fifth Circuit found the parties altered that presumption by “submitting, briefing, and generally disputing that issue…
We haven’t had a good waiver case in a while. The First Circuit served one up last week with a flourish, teaching me multiple new words in the process (not for the first time, either). It found that a plaintiff had waived its right to arbitrate, not by bringing its claims to court…
California is the Judd Nelson of The Preemption Club. (Or the John Bender, if you prefer using character names.) The Supreme Court has sent the California courts to preemption detention for ignoring the Federal Arbitration Act in blockbuster, groundbreaking cases (see Concepcion). But California cannot help itself. It keeps coming up with novel arguments…