Founding Partner Adam J. Levitt and Amy Keller, CIPP/US, Chicago Managing Partner and Chair of the firm’s Privacy, Technology, and Cybersecurity Litigation Practice Group, were published in Bloomberg Law on October 6, 2026, for their article titled, “Uber Ruling on Obtaining Assent Tests the Limits of Arbitration.”
Adam and Amy write, “Walker, Ford, and Olson don’t herald the end of corporate-forced arbitration of consumer disputes, nor should plaintiffs’ lawyers oversell them as doing so. Their significance is more basic. Courts should first determine whether the plaintiff agreed to arbitrate with the defendant under ordinary principles of contract law. Only then should they determine what the agreement requires.
That sequence isn’t hostile to arbitration; it’s essential to its legitimacy. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act (morally right or wrong) has given companies considerable power to force their customers to waive their Seventh Amendment rights and surrender a judicial forum, but that power depends on the proposition that the customers actually agreed to do so.
Companies remain free to insist on arbitration and to design transactions to obtain assent. What they can’t do is remove assent from the transaction, expand an agreement beyond the parties who made it, or use the existence of one contract to manufacture another.”
Read their full article in Bloomberg Law, online here.
