In a per curiam arbitrability opinion released today, the Texas Supreme Court held that a fraudulent inducement claim must be arbitrated, if the contract which was allegedly fraudulently induced contained an arbitration clause, even if the party seeking to compel arbitration is not a signatory to that contract. The case involves fraudulent inducement claims by a group of student electricians against a vocational College; they allege that the Coll

Continue reading...

Yesterday, we posted about a Third Court of Appeals opinion where a party seeking to compel arbitration was found to have not established the existence of an agreement to arbitrate. Today, the Texas Supreme Court addresses the same issue but comes up with the opposite result. The case involved claims by investors against their stock broker based on Enron stock losses. In this case, the plaintiffs, who sought to avoid arbitration, signed contracts

Continue reading...

Well, the Texas Appellate Law Blog scooped us on a Third Court of Appeals opinion handed down today in which the Court refuses to compel arbitration under either the TAA or the FAA. We will not simply recap what Mr. Smith has already posted on the subject, but we wanted to make a couple additional points about the interesting opinion. Really, the case is more about motion practice and Texas appellate practice than arbitrability issues. Judge Yele

Continue reading...

Earlier this week, the Fifth Circuit handed down an opinion reversing a decision from the Eastern District of Louisiana which had vacated an arbitral award (link is to .pdf file). The underlying case was a securities fraud action against a stock broker, which the Plaintiffs arbitrated under protest, having challenged the arbitrability of the case from the outset. The District Court, however, forced the parties to arbitrate, and the Defendant stok

Continue reading...

We have not been as diligent as we like to be recently with respect to this blog, due to, well, the practice of law. Anyhoo, as luck would have it, way back on May 24, when we ought to have been blogging but weren’t, the Third Court of Appeals issued a opinion denying a petition for writ of mandamus in an arbitration case. The issue is one that comes up a lot, and it’s an important one. We are just sorry we did not discuss it sooner.

Continue reading...

This past Friday, while Karl and I attended the Austin Bar Association’s annual Bench Bar conference, the Texas Supreme Court handed down another mandamus, per curiam opinion reversing trial court and court of appeals decisions not to compel arbitration. The case involved an employee of RLS Legal Solutions (“RLS”) named Amy Cobb Maida (“Maida”) who worked as a sales rep for RLS from 1997 until 2002. As per her employ

Continue reading...

A couple weeks ago, we talked about the basic un-appealability of arbitral awards, and the idea that any potential alternative rule must be pursued at the front-end: parties can contract for some sort of appellate review of an arbitral award, but if it’s not in the arbitration clause there is nothing beyond what the FAA or the TAA (in Texas) allows, plus extremely limited non-statutory grounds for challenging confirmation of awards. Which i

Continue reading...

Frequent guest commenter Rick Freeman made an important point yesterday in a comment to our post on the Apache v. Texaco case. Rick said, commenting not only on the Apache case but also on our post about Sen. West’s proposal that information about arbitrations be compiled: Instead of a statute that says the decisions will be compiled, why not one that says that, in true arms length negotiated arbitration agreements, taxpayer financed Texas

Continue reading...

Yesterday, the Fifth Circuit handed down an opinion confirming an arbitral award in favor of Texaco (link is to .pdf file) in a contract dispute over some off-shore oil exploration in the Bohai Bay of China. The opinion confirms the award with discussion of two important points, one which has been discussed at length in the Circuit, and one which has not.The arbitrator in this case awarded Texaco more than $71M, some $20M of which was an award of

Continue reading...

Well, the Florida arbitration blog has another interesting post today. It concerns a Missouri case where a court refused to compel arbitration of a wrongful death case against a nursing home. According to that case, since the Missouri wrongful death statute creates a new cause of action in favor of the decedent’s statutory beneficiaries, and it is not a cause of action that the decedent could have had prior to his/her death, the statutory b

Continue reading...