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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I predict that this is going to get more and more common: Companies enshittify their service, hiding behind impenetrable walls of AI chatbots and useless outsourced template-reply service centers, customers respond by taking one attempt to resolve it with the company and then straight to court.

If you have a working small claims court system, I can recommend giving it a try. It can be way less frustrating than trying to deal with a company that just doesn't want to.

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They're rolling out the arbitration clauses like mad recently though. There was an HN post a few years ago about going to arbitration and winning, so it's not a complete lost cause but I guess the damages would be less.

Arbitration is great for companies for multiple reasons:

- it avoids costly class actions in "big" cases - it avoids costly discovery in "big" cases - it avoids sky-high damages claims in extreme cases - it allows small everyday fuck-ups to be handled more cheaply than a court

However, I'd argue that for this kind of issue, arbitration isn't necessarily worse. Especially in a clear-cut case, you don't need the court to win, you just need the court to trigger an escalation at the company. Arbitration is good enough for that.

I admit I'm too lazy to Google, but are arbitration services regulated, so that if they flagrantly refused to rule in favor of a plaintiff in a case where (999/1000) lawyers would agree, can the arbitration service be sent to review the same way a doctor or lawyer could be disciplined? I can't imagine how you could legally sign over the right to sue to an agency that fails to apply basic principles of justice.

The standard is "manifest disregard of the law" - which, roughly speaking, means the arbitrator “understood and correctly stated the law but proceeded to ignore it.”

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Bobker, 636 F. Supp. 444 (S.D.N.Y. 1986)

There is no regulation of arbitration services.

thank you!

pre-dispute arbitration agreements is still worse for consumers in almost every possible way: https://arbitrationinformation.org/docs/problems/

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