Just three weeks into the year and already my pile of arbitration cases is a skyscraper! So, I will cover a lot of ground in this update.
First, the headline. Kimberly, Kourtney, and Khloe Kardashian moved to compel arbitration, although they were not signatories to the arbitration agreement. Kroma Makeup EU v. Boldface Licensing + Branding, 2017 WL 192690 (11th Cir. Jan. 18, 2017). Despite their celebrity status, they lost in both the Florida district court and the 11th Circuit. The problem...
At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.
The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation.
While the financial industry has long...
On March 1st, the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce’s (“ICC”) newly revised rules designed to enhance efficiency and transparency will become effective. According to the ICC:
Under the Expedited Procedure Rules, the ICC Court will normally appoint a sole arbitrator, irrespective of any contrary term of the arbitration agreement. Awards must be made in six months from the case management conference, with extensions granted only in limited and justified...
If you are a party that wants courts to rigidly enforce delegation clauses – sending questions about even the validity of the agreement to arbitration – then you will appreciate a new decision from the Tenth Circuit. In Belnap v. Iasis Healthcare, __ F.3d __, 2017 WL 56277 (10th Cir. Jan. 5, 2017), the court refused to do even a spot check of whether defendant’s claims of arbitrability were accurate and enforced the parties’ delegation clause.
Belnap involved a surgeon suing a medical...
Not sure this is actually a “set back for AI in Medicine.” Rather, long story short — it ain’t 2014 anymore … as we discuss in our talk – Machine Learning as a Service : #MLaaS, Open Source and the Future of Legal Analytics – what started with Watson has turned into significant competition among major technology industry players. Throw in a some open source and you have some really strong economic forces which are upending even business models which were sound just three years...
The other day, I came upon a blog post from the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School that is worth discussing. It is entitled “10 Hard Bargaining Negotiation Tactics” by Keith Lutz (January 10, 2017). I have seen one or more of these tactics often in mediation and despite my best efforts to help a party understand what is happening, I am not always “heard” or “listened” to.
The first tactic is one with which everyone is familiar: “extreme demands followed by small,...
Three state supreme courts tackled arbitration law in recent weeks: Alabama, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Rhode Island reversed a construction arbitration award because it disagreed with the arbitrator’s analysis. North Carolina found that an arbitration agreement in a doctor-patient setting was unenforceable as a breach of the doctor’s fiduciary duty. And Alabama strictly enforced an arbitral venue, even though that precluded class action.
Continuing its streak of hewing closely...
I saw a blog on the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School’s web page written by its staff (January 12, 2017) entitled “How Mood Affects Negotiators”. It caught my attention because I had just witnessed this effect in two of my mediations.
Recently, I held two mediations on the same day- one in the morning and one in the afternoon with the same plaintiff’s and defense counsel. The only new party in each mediation was the actual plaintiff. All of the other participants were...