Press Release

Washington, DC – Released today, a new report published by the American Association for Justice details the latest tactics corporations are using to unfairly stack the deck further in their favor, cutting off any means for consumers to seek accountability or win cases when they are hurt or defrauded by corporations. Forced arbitration is already a system rigged against consumers. These new tactics, unilaterally drafted by corporations even mid-dispute, are even more abusive and egregious.

These tactics include:

• Using third party contracts to push consumers into forced arbitration. Consumers are unexpectedly forced into arbitrations for credit reporting  errors simply because they had signed up for third party credit monitoring services.
• Before even being allowed to file their case, consumers are being forced to jump through additional procedural hoops to proceed. The BNPL (“buy now, pay later”) corporation Klarna forces its customers “to try, for 60 days, to resolve any Dispute informally,” giving the corporation an unfair sneak peek at the case.
• Changing the rules, and even the referee, midway through disputes. Ticketmaster changed forced arbitration providers, that Ticketmaster itself originally selected, midway through a dispute with Taylor Swift fans.
• Arbitrarily grouping cases together and dismissing them en masse.Verizon tried to thwart multiple cases about charging fake fees by grouping them into “batches” of 10 at a time, effectively delaying cases for years they would be barred by the statute of limitations.

“Some corporations decided that having overwhelming odds in their favor wasn’t enough, so they’ve stacked the forced arbitration deck even further,” said AAJ President Sean Domnick. “The tactics exposed in this report should outrage every consumer, worker and patient who is just playing by the rules and wants the choice of how to seek justice if they are harmed or scammed.”

Click here to read the full report. This report comes on the heels of a new report released last week by AAJ showing how the use of forced arbitration has surged to unprecedented levels.