Posted on 04/08/2020 6:32:58 AM PDT by Theoria
Lawyers and a Silicon Valley start-up have found ways to flood the system with claims, so companies are looking to thwart a process they created.
Teel Lidow couldn’t quite believe the numbers. Over the past few years, the nation’s largest telecom companies, like Comcast and AT&T, have had a combined 330 million customers. Yet annually an average of just 30 people took the companies to arbitration, the forum where millions of Americans are forced to hash out legal disputes with corporations.
Mr. Lidow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a law degree, figured there had to be more people upset with their cable companies. He was right. Within a few months, Mr. Lidow found more than 1,000 people interested in filing arbitration claims against the industry.
About the same time last year, Travis Lenkner and his law partners at the firm Keller Lenkner had a similar realization. Arbitration clauses bar employees at many companies from joining together to mount class-action lawsuits. But what would happen, the lawyers wondered, if those workers started filing tens of thousands of arbitration claims all at once? Many companies, it turns out, can’t handle the caseload.
Hit with about 2,250 claims in one day last summer, for example, the delivery company DoorDash was “scared to death” by the onslaught, according to internal documents unsealed in February in federal court in California.
Driven partly by a legal reformist spirit and entrepreneurial zeal, Mr. Lidow and Mr. Lenkner are leaders in testing a new weapon in arbitration: sheer volume.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Awesome. Arbitration clauses are a way of stacking the deck. Even when you have a good case, arbitration panels often split the baby.
The people who get paid for being on arbitration panels know which side their bread is buttered on.
What lawyers invent, lawyers can circumvent.
Hey, I made a rhyme! And now, I’ll hire a lawyer to trademark the phrase and sue the pants off anyone who uses it without my permission.
Arbitration is the worst. The best of them will split it 50/50 regardless of the truth of egregiousness of the bad actor in the case.
More often the always side with the party paying for the arbitration or the the cooperate interest. Arbitration is always a losing game for the individual.
Insurance companies are the easiest way to see just haw bad arbitration is, NEVER ARBITRATE!
Doesn’t matter if the courts are rigged. The companies they chose to attack in this manner will be those without the cash to fight all the cases, even if they win all or most.
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