Richard Frankel of Drexel has written Fighting Mass Arbitration: An Empirical Study of the Corporate Response to Mass Arbitration and Its Implications for the Federal Arbitration Act. Here’s the abstract: Over the last forty years, corporations have increasingly inserted mandatory arbitration provisions into their consumer and employment contracts. Most prominently, and with the Supreme Court’s blessing, […]
Category Archives: Class Actions
Plaintiffs filed class actions against Costa, a sunglasses manufacturer, for charging them over $100 to repair sunglasses that had been covered by lifetime warranties. The cases were consolidated, and an amended complaint requested both monetary damages and injunctive relief. The parties reached a settlement, agreeing on payments in the form of product vouchers and injunctive […]
In recent years, home sellers around the country have filed lawsuits against regional multiple listing services and affiliated realtors, generally alleging that by requiring sellers to agree to a single, set offer of compensation to any broker who found a buyer for their home in order to have their listing included (the “Buyer-Broker Commission Rule”), […]
Noteworthy news from this week: the Legal Aid Society in New York City sued the city and its mayor to force them to implement new laws that expand eviction protections for residents vulnerable to homelessness. The Legal Aid Society filed a class action on behalf of New Yorkers eligible for a new program that provides […]
The industry often claims that arbitration is cheaper than litigation for consumers. Well, not so much any more–if that was ever true–after the AAA’s new mass arbitration rules that Adam Pulver reported about on January 29. Adam mentioned the $3,125 initiation fee. In addition, under the new rules, for cases that proceed beyond the initiation […]
The TCPA prohibits “send[ing], to a telephone facsimile machine, an unsolicited advertisement.” 47 U.S.C. s. 227(b)(1)(c). After receiving such an unsolicited advertisement on its fax machine from AmeriFactors Financial Group, plaintiff Career Counseling, Inc. brought a putative class action in South Carolina. While that litigation was pending, AmeriFactors obtained a declaratory ruling from the FCC, […]
At Reuters, reporter Alison Frankel has this story on a recent class-action settlement with Verizon. Verizon (as is typical of cellphone companies) requires customers to agree to arbitrate any disputes that may arise. The settlement avoids appellate review of Verizon’s effort to limit arbitrations to batches of 10 at a time, which, in situations where […]
A group of consumers brought a class action against the New York Black Car Operators’ Injury Compensation Fund–a statutorily created fund that provides workers’ compensation benefits to New York’s black car drivers. The consumers argued that the fund had unlawfully collected a surcharge on noncash tips they paid to drivers (generally, through the Uber App), […]
The Eleventh Circuit today weighed in on a matter involving the increasingly frequent scenario of a corporate defendant refusing to comply with the terms of the arbitration agreement it foisted upon consumers. Three consumers who had bought timeshares through Wyndham Vacation Resorts filed claims for breach of contract and fraudulent inducement with the American Arbitration […]
I wrote The FAA Should Not Cover Consumer Claims, to appear in The Federal Arbitration Act: Successes, Failures, and a Roadmap for Reform (Richard A. Bales & Jill I. Gross eds., forthcoming 2024 Cambridge University Press). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection laws face a fundamental enforcement issue: because consumer claims are typically for small […]