Consumer Law

WSJ on Arbitration Bias

By Greg Beck

Last month, San Francisco sued the National Arbitration Forum, accusing the arbitrator of unfairly favoring credit card companies in disputes with their customers. Nathan Koppel of the Wall Street Journal this week delved deeper into the allegations of bias (the article is behind a paywall, but a summary is available at the WSJ law blog). The article notes that, because NAF works with a few big credit-card companies in a large number of cases against consumers, there is a built-in incentive to keep the companies happy.

Last year, a Public Citizen report found that arbitrators rule for business between 94 and 97 percent of the time.

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on April 25, 2008 (boomark / email).