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What changed, and what it means for the clause on your desk

Analysis of the decisions, provider rules, and scholarship shaping mass arbitration practice. Every piece links to the primary and secondary sources it draws on.

An abstracted broadsheet spread with one column set in navy as the lead story

Provider RulesAug 18, 2026

The Rulebook Rewrote Itself: Where AAA and JAMS Now Stand on Mass Filings

Two providers, two philosophies. The AAA applies its mass regime at its own discretion and flattened the initiation fee; JAMS will only run its procedures if you wrote them into the contract. The gap between those choices decides who has leverage on day one.

Rules Desk·Aug 18, 2026·4 min read

The short version

The AAA's mass rules reach 25 or more similar demands in consumer and employment matters and apply at the AAA's discretion — not by contractual election.
JAMS applies a single 75-claimant trigger regardless of dispute type, but only where the parties expressly adopted its Mass Arbitration Procedures.
The January 2024 AAA fee schedule replaced per-case initiation fees with a flat $11,250 and eliminated case management fees entirely.

Courts & DoctrineAug 11, 2026

Heckman Set the Ceiling on Protocol Design — and the Supreme Court Left It There

The Ninth Circuit struck down a bespoke mass arbitration regime root and branch, including its delegation clause. Certiorari was denied in October 2025. Every protocol drafted since has been written in that decision's shadow.

Courts Desk · 3 min

Courts & DoctrineJul 28, 2026

Rios v. HRB Digital: The Court Did the Arithmetic, and the Protocol Failed

Twenty-five coordinated claims per round. Aggressive resolution targets. A tolling provision the drafter could contest. The Northern District of California found the combination unconscionable — and gave every clause reviewer a checklist.

Courts Desk · 3 min

Courts & DoctrineJul 14, 2026

Wallrich and the Non-Payment Strategy: What the Seventh Circuit Actually Decided

Thirty-five thousand claimants, a $4.1 million invoice, and a respondent that declined to pay. The Seventh Circuit held a district court could not order it to — a ruling whose reach depends entirely on the words a clause uses to incorporate provider rules.

Courts Desk · 3 min

Courts & DoctrineJun 23, 2026

Achey: The Decision That Made Courts Count the Queue

Twenty-five claimants trigger the protocol; ten claims move at a time; nothing sets an outer limit and nothing tolls the clock. A New Jersey appellate court declined to sever, and struck the agreement in its entirety.

Courts Desk · 3 min

ScholarshipJun 9, 2026

106 Companies, Rewritten Clauses, and a Preemption Argument Nobody Expected

Richard Frankel's empirical study of corporate responses to mass arbitration documents what the redrafting wave actually produced — and argues that the resulting procedural apparatus may have drifted outside what the Federal Arbitration Act protects at all.

Research Desk · 3 min

ScholarshipMay 19, 2026

Glover's Taxonomy: Why Mass Arbitration Is Not a Variation on Anything

The first systematic account of mass arbitration argued it constitutes a genuinely new model of dispute resolution — and documented defendants abandoning the clauses they had spent two decades securing.

Research Desk · 3 min

InternationalMay 5, 2026

Why Mass Arbitration Stays Home

The institutional frameworks do not exist, consumer disputes are non-arbitrable across much of Europe, and investor-state filing fees make the model economically impossible. Mass arbitration looks likely to remain an American phenomenon.

Research Desk · 3 min

Clause DraftingApr 21, 2026

Nothing You Draft After the Demands Arrive Will Help

The defence bar has converged on one point: mass arbitration is a drafting problem, and the drafting window closes the moment the first tranche is filed. What a clause reviewed with mass exposure in mind actually contains.

Practice Desk · 4 min

Fees & EconomicsApr 7, 2026

The Fee Curve, Before and After January 2024

Case management fees, not filing fees, were what made mass arbitration devastating. The AAA eliminated them. Here is what the numbers look like on either side of that change — and where the cost has migrated to.

Rules Desk · 3 min

Fees & EconomicsMar 17, 2026

Who Pays for the Inventory: Funding, Conflicts, and the Disclosure Gap

Litigation funders increasingly finance mass arbitration campaigns. A funder's return depends on aggregate portfolio recovery; counsel owe duties to each individual claimant. No uniform disclosure regime exists to surface the tension.

Research Desk · 3 min

Policy & ReformFeb 24, 2026

The Carve-Out Is the Only Reform That Has Passed

Broad restrictions on consumer and employment arbitration have gone nowhere. The 2022 sexual assault and harassment statute did pass — and it established the template every serious reform proposal now follows.

Policy Desk · 3 min

Fees & EconomicsJan 27, 2026

The Premise That Turned Out to Be Contingent

Litigation theory held that claims worth less than the cost of bringing them cannot be litigated without a procedural aggregation device. Mass arbitration showed that premise depended on institutional design — and everything since has been an attempt to restore it.

Research Desk · 4 min