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Same As It Ever Was?

By Jeff Bowen
April 02, 2015

In the past few years, the Supreme Court has issued several important decisions limiting the availability of class-wide arbitration. While the impact on class-wide arbitration itself has been explored intensively, the potential impact on other forms of aggregation has received somewhat less attention, even though principles announced in these class arbitration cases could have an impact on the consolidation of commercial arbitration, including insurance coverage disputes. Lower courts, however, largely consider the landscape for consolidation relatively unchanged. Although several important questions remain unanswered by the Supreme Court, present case law suggests that arbitration clauses may permit consolidation even if those clauses do not address the issue overtly, and that arbitrators, rather than courts, make those decisions.

1. Consolidation of Insurance Arbitration: The Existing Regime

Arbitration is an attractive alternative to traditional litigation for many insurance coverage litigants, potentially offering heightened guarantees of confidentiality and the opportunity to draw upon rules providing expedited or more limited discovery. In some circumstances, arbitration can also provide a more cost-effective and a faster means of resolving disputes, though this, of course, varies considerably depending upon the nature of the dispute and the specific procedures involved. The private, contractual nature of arbitration, however, raises challenges for insurance disputes involving numerous related policies, such as commercial liability claims affecting both primary and excess policies. If such disputes were litigated in a judicial forum, the governing procedural rules would typically provide various ways of determining whether the parties should be brought together in one proceeding, such as joinder of parties or consolidation of actions for purposes of trial. Commercial arbitrations, by contrast, may lack well-established procedures on this point, and interested parties often simply move the courts or the arbitrators to order (or to prevent) consolidation of related arbitrations.

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