Info Good Ways on How to Combat Forced Arbitration

[Arnox]

Almost all forced arbitration clauses have a provision where they'll "graciously" pay the filing fees and arbitrator fees for any case you hit them with worth less than, say $50,000. (Microsoft was quoting $75,000 and below, but ultimately, it doesn't matter for our purposes.) This is done usually so the company can keep an arbitrator on their payroll. But this can be exploited. An attorney can hit a company with hundreds of arbitration requests, and the company would have to pay for all of those legal fees. I believe this was recently employed against Valve until they finally gave in and allowed class actions to be made against them, getting rid of arbitration entirely.

It may be said too that there is precedent to ensure companies HAVE to pay legal fees for arbitration.

In 1999's Shankle v. B-G Maintenance Management of Colorado, Inc, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant a motion to compel arbitration on the basis that the fees were too high for the plaintiff Matthew Shankle. The Texas Courts of Appeals found in 2022's Cont'l Homes of Texas v. Perez that an arbitration clause in the case was unenforceable due to unaffordable arbitration costs for the plaintiffs and the arbitration agreement not being an adequate remedy for litigation.

Wikipedia also mentions another case in California (Alberto v. Cambrian Homecare) where the entire arbitration agreement was void if any of the provisions in the contract are unenforceable.