The Texas Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases that present significant questions for the beginning and the end of the arbitration process. Those include whether an “unconscionable attorney fees” provision voids an arbitration agreement and what parties must do to vacate an arbitration award for alleged evident partiality.
Those issues arise in Venture Cotton Cooperative and Noble Americas Corp. v. Shelby Alan Freemanand Ponderosa Pine Energy LLC v. Tenaska Energy Inc., on which the high court granted review Nov. 22.
The issue in Venture Cotton, which is set for oral argument Jan. 9, 2014, is whether a trial court was correct in denying a party’s motion to compel arbitration in a business dispute because the arbitration agreement contained a “one-sided” provision that allowed one party to recover attorney fees if the other party was found to have breached a contract—but not vice versa.
In a Jan. 11 decision, Eastland’s Eleventh Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s ruling that the attorney-fees provision of the arbitration agreement was “unconscionable.”
