You Lost the Arbitration: New Options for Appeals

Arbitration isn’t for sore losers: a swift route to finality is traditionally a key to arbitration’s allure and to its risks. Federal and state arbitration laws narrowly limit the grounds upon which a party may challenge an arbitration award (to the integrity of the process) so that errors in the application of law or in determinations of the facts are not included. Of course, non-prevailing parties do try to get a court to revoke an arbitration award. For instance, Sony recently asked a federal judge in the Northern District of California to vacate an arbitration award against it in a patent licensing dispute with Immersion, from whom it had taken a license after an earlier patent infringement battle.

In recent years, however, parties have the option of agreeing in advance to an appeal process within arbitration. Leading arbitration forums such the American Arbitration Association and JAMS have introduced an optional “appeal” contract clause. If both sides agree going in, a losing party in arbitration can call for the forum to assemble a new panel of arbitrators with the power to affirm or reverse the underlying arbitration decision, and its decision becomes the final decision in the case. This webinar will report the latest on how this provision has been used. Our panel includes a lawyer at the AAA, an arbitrator, and a litigator who has extensive experience representing clients in disputes ancillary to litigation.

• 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm EST