Once again, Charles Forer, in his alternative dispute resolution articles for The Legal , has highlighted a significant issue that presents yet another crucial decision for counsel advising a client about an agreement to arbitrate a dispute.
In his August article, Forer posed the problem faced by an attorney whose client had lost in arbitration. The arbitrator had not only ruled adversely but had issued a reasoned opinion explaining why the client’s earlier motion for summary judgment involving a waiver-of-liability issue had been denied. Even more damaging to the client, however, was that the arbitrator’s harmful opinion had been disseminated generally among other attorneys whose clients were disputing the same legal issue with this client. Now, the attorney and client were fearful that armed with the arbitrator’s legal opinion, adversaries would no longer be dissuaded from bringing claims because the arbitrator’s opinion was “available to anyone who surfed the Internet, [and] was a roadmap to their success on the legal issue of waiver of liability.”
