by Jeff Sovern The report is titled Where White Men Rule: How the Secretive System of Forced Arbitration Hurts Women and Minorities. CNBC has a story here. Here's an excerpt from the report: Arbitrators in consumer and employment cases are mostly male and overwhelmingly white. At AAA and JAMS, the two largest consumer and employment […]
Category Archives: Arbitration
by Jeff Sovern Last week, I suggested that the CFPB adopt a new arbitration rule. Yesterday, Ballard Spahr's Mark Levin commented on my proposal, in a blog post titled Professor Sovern’s opt-in arbitration proposal is neither new nor supportable. This post responds to some of Mr. Levin's arguments. Mr. Levin wrote that my suggestion would […]
Here. Excerpt: * * With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits. Already, it faces at least three proposed class actions, including one brought May 18 alleging the company’s Alexa-powered Echo devices recorded people without permission. The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded […]
by Jeff Sovern I have a suggestion for the CFPB relating to arbitration. Many readers will know this background, but for those who don't: in 2010, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act, which in section 1028 directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study arbitration. The statute also authorized the Bureau to regulate consumer financial arbitration […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. [Disclosure: the website is put up by AAJ, which gave St. John's a grant to fund some of my research back in 2015]
Here. It might be behind a paywall, but you can find it on Lexis. I enjoyed and recommend the whole column, but here's an excerpt: Jim Kimberly, an AT&T spokesman, told me that "arbitration is a faster, less expensive, easier means of resolving disputes." * * * For businesses, arbitration is indeed faster, cheaper and […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. Which one do you think consumers are more likely to read? To understand? (HT: ContractsProf Blog)
by Jeff Sovern According to standard readability measures, arbitration clauses require a lot of education to understand. The CFPB arbitration study reported that the average arbitration clause was written at a level that required more than two years of college to grasp. A study that I co-authored found that consumers didn't understand arbitration clauses at […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the inference to be drawn from a must-read article in the NY Times, ‘Scared to Death’ by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System. The article points out that arbitrations are taking longer than billed, and companies are refusing to pay arbitration fees. AN ADDITIONAL NOTE: As Allison noted in an […]
Andrea Chandrasekher and David Horton, both of California–Davis, have written Empirically Investigating the Source of the Repeat Player Effect in Consumer Arbitration. Here's the abstract: Policymakers, courts, and scholars have long been interested in whether repeat players enjoy an advantage in forced arbitration. Sophisticated empirical studies of consumer and employment awards reveal that there is indeed […]