Want to give up a contractual right to arbitrate?  Easy.  Don’t seek to enforce it.  For example, just litigate for awhile and don’t mention your arbitration clause.  The court has no obligation sua sponte to raise or enforce your contractual right if you choose not to.

The Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) §7 (9 U.S.C. §7) enables arbitrators to “summon … any person to attend before them or any of them as a witness and in a proper case to bring with him or them any [document] which may be deemed material as evidence in the case.”

Gateway issues of arbitrability are presumptively for a court, rather than an arbitrator, to decide in the first instance. First Options of Chicago, Inc. v. Kaplan, 514 U.S. 938 (1995). But arbitration is a creature of contract, and the parties to an arbitration agreement ultimately have the power to determine who is to decide such issues. Hence, that presumption may be rebutted by the parties’ clear and unmistakable manifestation of their mutual intention that an arbitral tribunal should have the exclusive authority to decide arbitrability issues in the first instance. Id.; Howsam v. Dean Witter Reynolds, Inc., 537 U.S. 77, 83 (2002). While the federal courts have been identifying examples of the practical application of those principles, many questions are still unanswered and some have barely been posed.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided that the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) requirement that courts enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms includes the parties’ agreement to have an arbitrator decide “not only the merits of a particular dispute, but also ‘gateway’ questions of ‘arbitrability’....”  Henry Schein, Inc. v. Archer & White Sales, Inc., No. 17-1272 (U.S. Jan. 8, 2019).  (As is customary, the rookie Justice (Kavanaugh, J.) delivered the Court’s unanimous opinion.)  This judgment, issued little more than two months after oral argument, shatters the “wholly groundless” doctrine, which purported to enable federal courts to adjudicate gateway arbitrability issues notwithstanding the parties’ clear and unmistakable delegation of such issues to an arbitral tribunal, if the court decided that the argument for arbitrability was “wholly groundless.”  (The Courts of Appeals were split on the viability of that doctrinal exception.)

The Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (“HKIAC”) has promulgated a new set of Administered Arbitration Rules (“AAR”), effective November 1, 2018.  Among those rules are Articles 27-30 concerning the HKIAC’s powers to join additional parties in an arbitration, to consolidate arbitrations, to consolidate related claims in a single arbitration, and to coordinate related unconsolidated arbitral proceedings.  Those powers, which the HKIAC can exercise without the consents of the parties to any bilateral arbitration agreement, are not trivial; among other things, they arguably institutionalize pathways to collective or opt-in class arbitration proceedings.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has joined five other Circuits in determining, unremarkably, that class or collective arbitrability is a gateway question that is presumptively for the court to decide.  It then apparently ignored the issue of whether the parties delegated such arbitrability questions to an arbitrator.  See Herrington v. Waterstone Mortgage Corp., No. 17-3609 (7th Cir. Oct. 22, 2018).  (Yet we may infer from the Court’s decision that incorporation by reference in an arbitration agreement of the Employment Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association does not constitute a clear and unmistakable manifestation of the parties’ intent to delegate the class/collective arbitrability question to an arbitrator.)

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals held recently that it could not compel arbitration demanded by a non-signatory to an arbitration agreement when the New York Convention applied.  See Outokumpu Stainless USA, LLC v. Converteam SAS (c/k/a GE Energy Power Conversion France SAS, Corp., No. 17-10944, 2018 WL 4122807 (11th Cir. Aug. 30, 2018).

The U.S. Supreme Court has pointed out consistently in recent years that the relatively new construct of “class arbitration” is very different from your uncle’s classic bilateral arbitration. (“Class arbitration” signifies the utilization of a class action protocol (Fed. R. Civ. P. 23) in an arbitration proceeding.) One might expect, therefore, that the adjudication of issues concerning the one would differ from the adjudication of the same issues concerning the other. Delegation of the arbitrability question is one such issue. Have the lower federal courts adopted such a view? Count the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals as another that has decided against it, and that whether the “class arbitrability” issue has been delegated to an arbitrator should be adjudicated using the same criteria as are applied to that issue with respect to bilateral arbitration.

In our sister blog, ADR: Advice from the Trenches, Gil Samberg explains the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, applying the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the recent Epic Systemscase, that the “collective action” provision of the FLSA does not render a collective action waiver in an arbitration agreement unenforceable.

When the Supreme Court ruled recently that the “concerted activities” provision of the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) did not make a contractual waiver of “class arbitration” unenforceable, it provided an extensive analysis that included comments regarding the interaction of the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), the NLRA, and the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”).