Plenty of litigants have tried—without success—to convince the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to let them out of arbitration agreements. Add Samantha Diggs to that list. The Fifth Circuit turned down her challenge to an arbitration agreement—a challenge in which she used statistics to allege that the American Arbitration System (AAA) is systematically “biased” against employees.
After a trial court granted her former employer’s motion to compel arbitration based on her employment agreement, she challenged that ruling last year in the Fifth Circuit. She cited a 2009 affidavit and study performed by Cornell University labor law professor Alexander Colvin. Colvin looked at 1,213 employment awards between 2003 and 2007, which found, among other things, that the employee win rate on discrimination allegations was only 21.4 percent in arbitrations, compared to 36.4 percent in federal court and 43.8 percent in state court. [See "Arbitration Arithmetic" Texas Lawyer, July 22, 2013, page 1].
