The Tennessee Court of Appeals has held that new arguments for vacatur or modification first raised over 90-days post-award do not relate back and may not be considered under the State’s version of the Uniform Arbitration Act.
The Court held that an amended pleading seeking to vacate an arbitration award delivered over 90 days earlier does not relate back to the original pleading date (within the 90 days) under Tenn. R. Civ. P. 15.03.
The 90-day limitations period within which to move to vacate under Tennessee’s Uniform Arbitration Act, Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-5-301 et seq., is ...
On April 9, FINRA amended its customer arbitration rules to give customers more options when a Respondent firm or associated person becomes “inactive” during an arbitration.
The largest percentage of unpaid customer awards in FINRA arbitrations are those against Respondent firms or associated persons who are “inactive” – that is, whose FINRA membership has been terminated, suspended, canceled, or revoked. Those “inactive” Respondents are out of the business – and often just out of business, period.
FINRA Rule 12202 requires a customer Claimant to ratify, by ...
FINRA has proposed a new $100 per-arbitrator fee and a $100 per-arbitrator honorarium for the late cancellation or continuation of prehearing conferences in FINRA arbitrations. The proposed rule change would affect both customer cases and industry cases, and FINRA is seeking to amend FINRA Rules 12214(a), 12500, 12501, 13214(a), 13500, and 13501. In essence, if one or more of the arbitrating parties cancels or obtains a continuance of a prehearing conference within three business days of the scheduled hearing (for example, an Initial Prehearing Conference or "IPHC"), the ...
The Supreme Court Monday re-affirmed the enforceability of class-waivers in arbitration agreements. The five-justice majority felt the need to rebuke the California courts for trying to end-run Federal preemption through a latent "States-rights" nullification approach. Two of the three dissenters saw the case as a consumerist crusade against big business. But the biggest take away for businesses using arbitration clauses just might lie hidden within the opinion. DirectTV's Conditional Class-Waiver. DirectTV's consumer contracts contained a conditional class waiver ...
Last week the Fifth Circuit weighed in on how inartfully crafted arbitration and forum-selection clauses might trump one another. Together with recent decisions from the Second and Ninth Circuits - each with cert petitions pending - the issue seems poised for Supreme Court determination. Forum-Selection vs Arbitration Pending Supreme Court? The Second and Ninth Circuits held that a subsequent contractual forum-selection clause requiring all disputes to be resolved in a specified federal-court trumps FINRA's base requirement that FINRA member firms must arbitrate upon a ...
In Regulatory Notice 13-40, FINRA announced that the SEC had approved amendments to its Discovery Guide. The Discovery Guide applies to customer cases (rather than intra-industry cases) and outlines presumptively discoverable documents that the parties to an arbitration should exchange without FINRA or an arbitrator intervening. The amendments concern three areas: (1) electronic discovery, (2) product cases, and (3) affirmations. First, the Discovery Guide was amended to clarify that electronic files are "documents" under the meaning of the Discovery Guide and that ...