Really? Isn't the arbitration binding and therefore the end of the matter?

I mean both are right, they made a bullshit filing about something being confidential, in order to negotiate a confidentiality settlement against it.

It's minor, but they are not accepting the award as-is, they are still trying to negotiating, albeit in a minor way, not by contesting the amount, but a confidentiality clause.

They love to negotiate confidentiality clauses, there's few cases without it, including a case by Mike Rafi's personal injury firm which resulted from an omission by Uber (and later Uber being much more anal about confidentiality). I think it's a strategy to avoid case law catching on.

Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.

Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.

Did you mean "litigation" rather than "legislation" ?

They are very profitable when they win, what is the win rate of class action cases. Also what is the win rate of chosen class action cases versus all potential class action cases.

Measurement matters here.

I wonder how often this is the case. The one time I read the fine print when signing up for a service, it said that I had the right to disagree with the choice of arbiter, and get some national organization to pick a different arbiter independently.

I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.

Arbitration is fine. Forced arbitration is not.

I always thought arbitration was forcing weaker parties out of the fairer legal system. Now I wonder if that's a planted idea by the legal industry? It made sense to me that arbitration was paid for by the company, and there would be incentives for the judge to side with their long term meal ticket. But perhaps all that is wrong? I really wish you could elaborate on why it is better, I'm very interested in challenging my assumptions here.

Companies like arbitration because unlike in a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff cannot compel discovery. Paying for an arbitrator is cheaper than going through discovery, especially if the discovery unearths facts materially damaging to the business.

I don't think you really read the comment. They specifically mentioned it for civil matters

I believe what he's referring to is the cost of the legal system. Lawyers cost money, and if the other party has a lot more money, they can play all kinds of tactics to keep the case going (filing pointless motions, drowning your lawyer with huge amounts of documents, etc).

With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.

There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).

All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.

That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.

A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).

And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.

Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.

Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.

The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.

In this case, that doesn't seem to be what happened? The judge ruled against them.

Louis founded the Consumer Rights wiki and also wrote the article that's the subject of this post.

Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.

No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.

I agree that word is putting some work, and calling it forced is already partisan.

To the extent that you believe it is forced, you can dispute it on a public court, and if you can prove you were forced, you wouldn't be subject to arbitration.

Arbitration in private courts only exists if both parties agree prior to agreeing to the contract to that clause.

If you believe that it's forced because you never read the Terms of Agreement, I feel that's more of a discussion of whether clickwrapped terms are valid or not, it would be a way more radical position to believe that they have absolutely no effect. And if they do have an effect, agreeing to private arbitration is no different.

It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.

I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.

Arbitration isn't the issue. The issue is when one of the parties has vastly more legal resources than the other, and gets to pick the arbiter.

Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.

But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.

So should guilty pleas, nondisclosure agreements, and trials where juries can't decide on degree rather than prosecutors.

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761654

All these companies are universally sleazy and refuse to take responsibility, no matter what. It's pretty much par for the course: deny you are responsible, try to control the court case in such a way that you inflict even more suffering on the victims and their families and ultimately, even if you're found to be in the wrong do everything to stall payment until each and every legal avenue to do so is exhausted.

Do you expect that Waymo will not take responsibility for the driverless car?

There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.

And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.

They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.

There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.

But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.

So Uber took this into forced arbitration to avoid the courts and then the arbitration blew up in their face. Sorry, but there’s some strong schadenfreude there.

Arbitration has no particular basis in law so much as agreeing that a third party reaches some conclusion to resolve a civil dispute, though the law may be used to justify the conclusion, the conclusion is binding regardless, so as to make it so there's no appeals, etc., right? So by participating in the arbitration it means there's only the conclusion and no basis to object or appeal, right?

People do that with judges too. It’s why all mp3 sharing lawsuits were in the same district of Texas.

At no point in time has anyone ever suspected that companies requiring arbitration was in the best interests of the consumer. This is very plainly an attempt to avoid responsibility and consequences. It's a margin-improving policy. The safety of its customers are merely a number on a spreadsheet.

Imagine this could've gone if Uber had used its tracking and vast knowledge of roadways to know to follow up with riders on a cancelled ride on the highway or even deny drivers the right to cancel the trip on the highway because that is unsafe. Could've prevented all this, have they learned from this case to prevent future incidents?

So wait. There’s a literal DEATH involved here and it still went to arbitration?!