Assuming you were all caught up on your Words With Friends games, you would read the 168-page initial report of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau about arbitration!  This well-written report is the CFPB’s preliminary findings about consumer financial arbitration, which is that agency’s homework assignment under the Dodd-Frank Act.  In short, the study does a nice job finding statistics where statistics are hard to come by, confirming some things that we all knew from reading the case law in the last few years, and shedding light in a few areas.

The study focused on the “front end” of arbitration — when arbitration is required by contracts, what the arbitration agreement says, who demands arbitration after there is a dispute, the dollar amount at dispute, and who is represented by counsel.  Not, in other words, who won.  It also focused on three specific types of financial contracts that consumers enter into: credit card agreements, checking account agreements, and general purpose reloadable prepaid cards (which I had never heard of before reading the report).

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