Employment Arbitration

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AB 51, which restricts workplace arbitration, was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2020. On December 30, 2019, US District Judge Kimberly Mueller granted a temporary restraining order to prevent the legislation from taking effect. She did so in response to a lawsuit by the California Chamber of Commerce and other employer groups arguing…

We’ve noted before that AB 51 – the California legislature’s latest attempt to attack workplace arbitration – has significant legal flaws. On December 30, 2019, US District Judge Kimberly Mueller granted a temporary restraining order to prevent the legislation from taking effect on January 1, 2020. Judge Mueller ruled that the employer groups bringing the…

We’ve been blogging about attacks on workplace arbitration for over ten years now. (See, for example, this October 2009 post.) AB 51 represents the latest attempts by plaintiffs’ attorneys to ensure that their clients have continued access to employee-friendly juries, rather than to arbitrators with experience understanding and applying the relevant law. We’ve written…

One of my least favorite phrases in blogging is “repurposing content.” The verb “repurposing” hurts my ears. You can give something a purpose, but you’re not “purposing” it. And if “purposing” isn’t a verb, how did “repurposing” become one?

While I hate the term, I love the concept. We’ve posted to this blog over 550…

California’s legislature has passed two new statutes that increase the protections for employees arbitrating workplace disputes.

SB 1007, which passed on September 1, 2016, gives any party to arbitration proceedings “the right to have a certified shorthand reporter transcribe any deposition, proceeding, or hearing as the official record.” I routinely advise employers to have…

When you draft employment arbitration agreements, it’s not enough to know what the law is. You should also know what the law will be at the time that someone challenges the agreement. Since this area of law changes continuously, that’s pretty hard to do without a crystal ball.

For a while, some courts in California…

My colleague Brian Berkley in Philadelphia wrote a piece in today’s Law360 titled “Can Opt-Out Provisions Save Arbitration Clauses?” He focuses on recent litigation involving Uber and its efforts to enforce arbitration agreements (which include class action waivers) against employees seeking to litigate wage and hour claims in court. Brian explains that Uber…

We asked nearly 4 years ago if Armendariz (the key California Supreme Court case from 2004 on employment arbitration) was on a collision course with Concepcion (the US Supreme Court case from 2011). Concepcion said that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state laws that “stand[] as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the…