Mass Arbitrations

Keller Postman pursues hundreds of thousands of individual arbitrations simultaneously for employees and consumers who are forced into arbitration. Large corporations often compel injured employees and consumers to give up their right to go to court and instead participate in a process designed by the business to favor itself. Keller Postman puts power on our clients’ side by outmatching even the largest corporations with ample resources, expert lawyering, and the latest technology to pursue thousands of individual claims all at once.

Keller Postman has single-handedly changed the way big corporations think about arbitration clauses.

Our team has successfully represented plaintiffs in complex mass-arbitration proceedings throughout the United States, including:

• Wage-and-hour disputes
• Employee-misclassification claims
• Consumer-product disputes
• Other types of contract-related disputes

What Is Arbitration?

Arbitration is an out-of-court dispute-resolution proceeding that serves as an alternative to litigation. Arbitration differs from litigation in a few key respects:

• In litigation, a judge or jury decides the case. In arbitration, the parties choose an arbitrator to resolve the dispute.
• Arbitration involves many of the same elements as a court case, but it follows a less formal, more streamlined process. The rules governing arbitration are also different from—and less rigid than—the rules governing litigation.
• An arbitrator’s decision is usually binding on the parties and cannot be appealed or reviewed by a court except in limited circumstances.

Potential Challenges of Arbitration for Plaintiffs

Large corporate defendants often prefer arbitration to litigation because consumers and employers are typically required to bring claims individually in arbitration and cannot rely on the efficiencies of class actions the way they can in court. This gives large companies leverage over plaintiffs in several ways:

• Consumers or employees often have trouble finding a lawyer willing to represent a client with a small or medium-sized claim.
• Plaintiffs sometimes are required to pay a filing fee to pursue an arbitration, and that fee can represent a significant percentage of the total value of the claim.
• Although arbitration is intended to be simpler and faster than litigation, some defendants use their greater resources to complicate and delay the process.

How Keller Postman Levels the Playing Field for Plaintiffs

In bringing the resources necessary to arbitrate claims at a large scale, we provide access to justice for thousands of employees and consumers who are contractually barred from participating in class actions. Exploited employees and consumers can now turn the arbitration game against the companies that harmed them. And judges now call companies out for their hypocrisy when they object to the terms of the arbitration process that they insisted on–or even designed–in the first place.

In terms of disrupting the status quo, Keller Postman’s arbitration strategy is one of the most significant developments in the area of civil litigation.