A look at law firm Keller Lenkner and startup FairShake, which file arbitration lawsuits against companies en masse, including 2K+ against DoorDash in one day
New York Times : Tweets: @dealbook , @carnage4life , @dtunkelang , @mattdpearce , @jbsgreenberg , @profdaf , @nytimesbusiness , @jbsgreenberg , @deepakguptalaw , @adamliptak , @ssamcham , and @stacycowley Tweets: @dealbook : As companies face a flood of arbitration claims, they are employing new strategies to thwart the very process that they have upheld as the optimal way to resolve disputes, our @mcorkery5 and @jbsgreenberg write. https://www.nytimes.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Companies have effectively banned class action lawsuits by requiring accepting arbitration in their terms of service. Now lawyers have weaponized this by helping automate complaints & companies realize thousands of small claims worse than class action 😂 https://www.nytimes.com/... Daniel Tunkelang / @dtunkelang : Corporations that thought forced arbitration was a great idea to tilt the scales against employees, gig workers, and customers now face the prospect of mass arbitration. As the judge said, “there is a lot of poetic justice here.” https://www.nytimes.com/... @mattdpearce : “There is no way that the system can handle mass arbitrations. ... The companies are trying to weasel their way out of the system that they created.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Jessica Silver-Greenberg / @jbsgreenberg : NEW: Companies said arbitration was an easy alternative to going to court. They said it was faster and more efficient. And then, people started actually going. And, it turns out, they didn't want that at all. A wild tale with @mcorkery5 https://www.nytimes.com/... David Friedman / @profdaf : “There's a lot of poetic justice here.” https://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimesbusiness : When DoorDash was hit with more than 6,000 arbitration claims last summer, it was “scared to death” by the onslaught, according to internal documents https://www.nytimes.com/... Jessica Silver-Greenberg / @jbsgreenberg : NEW: The DoorDashers helping people stay sheltered at home during this insane time are involved in their own insane battle. Read the wild tale. w/@mcorkery5 https://www.nytimes.com/... Deepak Gupta / @deepakguptalaw : Great NYT story on poetic justice for corporations that try to thwart access to justice through forced arbitration: “[A]s companies face a flood of claims, they are employing new strategies to thwart the very process that they have upheld as the optimal way to resolve disputes.” https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Adam Liptak / @adamliptak : What if thousands of workers and consumers, shut out of court by arbitration clauses, all filed arbitration complaints? @mcorkery and @jbsgreenberg explore. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Sasha Samberg-Champion / @ssamcham : Excellent story about how companies that force people into arbitration now are trying to get out of arbitrating thousands of claims. https://twitter.com/... Stacy Cowley / @stacycowley : Years ago, Jess & Michael exposed the way the arbitration system was being used to kill class-action lawsuits. Here's a twist: Some companies are now going ‘um, whoops!’ and want to avoid arbitration. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Forced arbitration clauses were built to kill class actions — corporate disclosures to Congress showed almost nobody actually filed individual claims. Keller Lenkner and FairShake have inverted that design: by filing thousands of individual demands at once, they make each claim cheap for the consumer but ruinously expensive per-head for the company, since arbitration carries per-case fees.
The playbook has already worked at scale. Uber disclosed 60,000+ driver arbitration suits in its IPO prospectus, with legal experts pegging the cost above $600M, and Amazon quietly let customers sue in court after more than 75,000 Echo-related demands. DoorDash, hit with over 6,000 claims last summer before this latest 2,000-in-a-day wave, is now the live test case.
First-order effects
- DoorDash faces mounting per-claim arbitration fees on top of legal defense costs, with the Times reporting companies are now deploying new tactics to stall or thwart the very arbitration process they once championed as the optimal way to resolve disputes.
Second-order effects
- Other gig platforms watching DoorDash must choose between Uber's path — absorbing mass-filing costs — and Amazon's path of rewriting terms to push disputes back into court, since either way the fee-shield economics of mandatory arbitration break down.
Third-order effects
- If mass arbitration keeps making individual clauses costlier than class actions, forced arbitration loses its core business rationale, shifting platform labor and consumer disputes toward open-court litigation and inviting legislative scrutiny of the clause itself.
The trend: Mass arbitration is turning companies' own anti-class-action tool into a financial weapon, forcing platforms like DoorDash, Uber, and Amazon to retreat from mandatory arbitration clauses.