LendingTree Arbitration Ruling: Ninth Circuit Keeps Snowflake Breach Claims in the Montana MDL

The Ninth Circuit on Nov. 4, 2026 refused to let LendingTree and its insurance-comparison subsidiary QuoteWizard force consumers' Snowflake data breach claims into individual arbitration, holding in Nader v. LendingTree, LLC that the companies' websites were designed in a way that never produced mutual assent to the terms of use. The LendingTree arbitration ruling affirms a District of Montana order from October 2025 and sends the consumer claims back into the Snowflake multidistrict litigation, MDL No. 3126, where they will proceed as a putative class action alongside claims against Snowflake, Ticketmaster and other corporate customers of the cloud provider.

The disposition is short and unpublished. Its practical weight comes from where it lands: inside one of the largest data breach MDLs in the federal system, against a company that only three years earlier persuaded a different federal court to send breach claims to the American Arbitration Association (AAA). For businesses that rely on a single hyperlink at the bottom of a lead-generation form, the case is a reminder that contract formation, not unconscionability, is now where most online arbitration fights are won and lost in the Ninth Circuit.

What did the Ninth Circuit decide in the LendingTree arbitration ruling?

The Ninth Circuit held that LendingTree, LLC and QuoteWizard.com, LLC cannot compel arbitration because the design elements of their websites prevented the formation of a mutual agreement to the terms of use that contained the arbitration clause. The panel therefore left in place the district court's denial of the defendants' motion to compel arbitration.

The case is Nader, et al. v. LendingTree, LLC, et al., No. 25-7045. The Ninth Circuit's own list of memorandum dispositions shows it was filed on Nov. 4, 2026, on appeal from the District of Montana's Butte Division, and decided by Judges Richard C. Tallman, Carlos T. Bea and Daniel A. Bress. Law360 reported the decision on Nov. 5.

Three points define the holding:

• It is a formation ruling. The panel did not hold the arbitration clause unfair, oversized or unconscionable. It held that no agreement to arbitrate was shown to exist in the first place, because the websites did not establish mutual assent.
• It covers both entities. The appeal was brought by the parent, LendingTree, and by QuoteWizard, the subsidiary whose customer data was taken in the 2024 Snowflake campaign. Neither can use its terms of use to move the consumer claims out of court.
• It ends the interlocutory detour. The appeal was taken from an order denying arbitration, which the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) makes immediately appealable. With the affirmance, the arbitration question is resolved at the appellate level unless the companies seek rehearing or Supreme Court review.

Why can't LendingTree force Snowflake breach claims into arbitration?

LendingTree cannot force the Snowflake breach claims into arbitration because it could not prove the consumers ever agreed to its terms of use: according to the Ninth Circuit, the way the websites were designed prevented mutual assent, and without assent there is no arbitration agreement to enforce. The burden of proving that an agreement was formed sits with the party seeking to compel arbitration.

The district court reached the same result in October 2025. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris denied LendingTree's motion to compel arbitration (Doc. 424 on the MDL docket) on Oct. 30, 2025, and Bloomberg Law reported at the time that the court found LendingTree had failed to give the plaintiffs sufficient notice of the arbitration clause. That is the language of the Ninth Circuit's standard formation test, which looks to two elements when a consumer has no actual knowledge of the terms:

1. Reasonably conspicuous notice. The website must present the existence of the terms in a way a reasonably prudent internet user would notice, judged by font size, color, placement and the overall design of the screen.
2. Unambiguous manifestation of assent. The user must take an action, such as clicking a button or checking a box, that the website clearly explains will signal agreement to those terms.

The test comes from Berman v. Freedom Financial Network, LLC, the Ninth Circuit's 2022 decision on a lead-generation website that is close in kind to LendingTree's comparison-shopping business. In Berman, the court refused to enforce terms that appeared in small gray text below a "continue" button, and it treated the mention of "mandatory arbitration" in the notice as irrelevant if the notice itself was not conspicuous. A company that collects consumer information through multi-step quote forms is exactly the kind of operator the Berman framework was built to test.

Available reporting does not describe which specific screens, buttons or hyperlinks the panel examined, or which state's contract law it applied, and those details are therefore not stated here. What is clear from both the district court's notice finding and the appellate court's assent finding is that the problem was the interface, not the text of the clause.

Is the LendingTree arbitration ruling binding precedent?

No. The LendingTree arbitration ruling is an unpublished memorandum disposition, and under Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3 memorandum dispositions are not precedent except in narrow circumstances such as law of the case or claim preclusion. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 32.1, parties may still cite it to other courts as persuasive authority.

The non-precedential status matters less than it might seem. The Ninth Circuit reserves memorandum dispositions for cases that apply settled law rather than change it, which is itself a signal: the panel treated the outcome as a straightforward application of its existing online-contract cases. District judges in California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Montana and the other states of the circuit will read Nader together with the published decisions that supply the rule, and defense and plaintiffs' counsel will cite it as one more example of a website that failed the test.

What is the Snowflake data breach MDL?

The Snowflake data breach MDL is In re Snowflake, Inc., Data Security Breach Litigation, MDL No. 3126, a consolidated federal proceeding in the District of Montana that gathers lawsuits arising from a 2024 hacking campaign against corporate customers of the cloud data platform Snowflake Inc. Judge Brian Morris presides over the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL).

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized the cases on Oct. 4, 2024, describing them as sharing common factual issues concerning a cluster of breaches of Snowflake customer accounts that occurred in roughly April through June 2024. The panel chose the District of Montana over the Northern District of Georgia, the other leading proposal, and has kept transferring tag-along actions through 2025 and 2026.

According to Google's Mandiant unit, which investigated the campaign, the attackers used stolen login credentials to reach the Snowflake accounts of as many as 165 of the company's customers. Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, AT&T, Advance Auto Parts, Neiman Marcus and LendingTree's QuoteWizard were among the companies whose data was implicated. In June 2024 LendingTree confirmed that Snowflake had told it QuoteWizard may have been affected, while saying it did not appear that consumer financial account information, or information belonging to the parent entity, was involved. QuoteWizard sent notification letters to affected consumers in July 2024, according to later class pleadings.

Nader v. Snowflake, Inc. et al., No. 2:24-cv-00079, was filed in the District of Montana on Aug. 15, 2024 by plaintiff Antoun Nader against Snowflake and LendingTree, and it became part of the MDL. Other consumer suits against the company, including one first filed in North Carolina by Linda Pierce and Nathan Thomas, were sent to Montana as well.

Timeline of the Snowflake MDL arbitration fight

Date	Event
April-June 2024	Attackers use stolen credentials to access Snowflake customer accounts, including QuoteWizard's
June 2024	LendingTree confirms QuoteWizard may have been affected
July 2024	QuoteWizard notification letters reach consumers
Aug. 15, 2024	Nader v. Snowflake, Inc. et al. filed in the District of Montana
Oct. 4, 2024	JPML centralizes the Snowflake cases as MDL No. 3126 before Judge Brian Morris
Oct. 28-29, 2025	Court largely denies motions to dismiss by Ticketmaster, Live Nation and Snowflake
Oct. 30, 2025	Court denies LendingTree and QuoteWizard's motion to compel arbitration
Nov. 2025	Defendants appeal; Ninth Circuit dockets No. 25-7045
Nov. 4, 2026	Ninth Circuit memorandum rejects the appeal
Nov. 5, 2026	Law360 reports the decision

The motion-to-dismiss rulings in late October 2025 matter to the arbitration story. Judge Morris allowed the core negligence claims against Ticketmaster and Live Nation to proceed and denied Snowflake's motion, which meant LendingTree's arbitration clause was its main route out of the MDL. That route is now closed.

Did LendingTree win arbitration in an earlier data breach case?

Yes. In Granados v. LendingTree, LLC, No. 3:22-cv-00504, a federal court in the Western District of North Carolina sent claims over a 2022 cyberattack on LendingTree to individual arbitration in 2023, after a magistrate judge recommended granting the company's motion to compel arbitration and stay the claims. U.S. District Judge Max O. Cogburn Jr. overruled the plaintiff's objection and adopted that recommendation in an order dated March 28, 2023.

The contrast is the most useful part of the Nader story for practitioners, and no other coverage of the ruling has drawn it. In Granados, the court applied the familiar two-part FAA inquiry, asking whether a valid agreement existed and whether the dispute fell within its scope, and found LendingTree's terms of use, which called for binding individual arbitration administered by the AAA, enforceable against a LendingTree user. The plaintiff's claims, which included unjust enrichment and violations of the North Carolina Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act, went to an arbitrator.

Three differences help explain why the same company lost in Montana:

• Different law of the circuit. Granados was decided in the Fourth Circuit. Nader was decided under Ninth Circuit formation law, which since Berman in 2022 and Chabolla v. ClassPass in 2025 has demanded close, screen-by-screen scrutiny of whether a website's notice was conspicuous and whether the user's click was clearly tied to the terms.
• Different entities and flows. The Snowflake claims involve QuoteWizard as well as LendingTree, and the consumers reached the companies through insurance-comparison and lead forms rather than, necessarily, the account relationship at issue in Granados. A clause that binds one set of users does not automatically bind another set who came through a different interface.
• Different evidence. Formation rulings turn on screenshots, records of what a particular plaintiff saw, and declarations about how a page looked on a particular date. The proponent must prove the version of the page each plaintiff encountered. A weaker record produces a different result even under the same clause.

The lesson is not that LendingTree's clause is unenforceable everywhere. It is that an arbitration program is only as strong as the specific interface through which each consumer arrived.

How does the ruling fit the Ninth Circuit's online-contract cases?

The LendingTree arbitration ruling is the latest in a run of Ninth Circuit decisions refusing to enforce online arbitration clauses on formation grounds, a run that began with Berman and now includes several 2025 and 2026 cases involving sign-in wraps and email sign-ups.

Case	Date	Interface	Result
Berman v. Freedom Financial Network (published)	Apr. 5, 2022	Lead-generation form; terms in small gray text below "continue"	No agreement; established the two-part test
Chabolla v. ClassPass (published, 2-1)	Feb. 27, 2025	Sign-in wrap across several screens	No agreement; Judge Bybee dissented
Godun v. JustAnswer (published)	Apr. 15, 2025	Sign-in wrap at checkout	No agreement
Perkins v. Rugs.com (memorandum)	Oct. 28, 2026	Email "Join Now" sign-up beside a Terms of Use link	No agreement; browsewrap theory also rejected
Nader v. LendingTree (memorandum)	Nov. 4, 2026	LendingTree and QuoteWizard websites	No agreement; claims stay in MDL 3126

In Chabolla, the court focused on the one screen that actually offered a way to assent and emphasized that several imperfect notices across a flow do not add up to a proper one. Godun reached a similar result for a sign-in wrap. Our coverage of Perkins v. Rugs.com earlier this week showed the same approach applied to a pop-up email box. Nader extends the pattern to a data breach MDL, where the stakes of losing the arbitral forum are measured in the size of a potential class rather than one consumer's claim.

What happens next in the LendingTree Snowflake lawsuit?

The consumer claims against LendingTree and QuoteWizard now proceed in MDL No. 3126 before Judge Morris on the same track as the rest of the litigation, subject only to any petition for rehearing or for certiorari. A petition for panel or en banc rehearing is ordinarily due 14 days after judgment in a civil case where the United States is not a party, and the court's mandate issues after that period runs.

Two procedural features shaped the year-long detour. First, Section 16 of the FAA allows an immediate appeal from an order denying a motion to compel arbitration, so the companies did not have to wait for final judgment. Second, the Supreme Court held in Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski (2023) that a district court must stay proceedings on the claims subject to such an appeal while it is pending. The affirmance ends that window. Further review is uncommon after an unpublished memorandum that applies settled circuit law, though it remains available.

Back in the MDL, the litigation has moved well past the pleadings. Docket listings for October and November 2026 show active motion practice, and the Lieff Cabraser firm has described discovery as ongoing since the October 2025 rulings. No settlement involving LendingTree or QuoteWizard has been reported, and Ticketmaster, Live Nation and Snowflake have continued to contest the claims. A class must still be certified before any LendingTree consumer recovers on a class-wide basis, and the companies keep every merits and class certification defense.

What it means for drafters, defendants and claimants' counsel

For drafters of online terms. The Nader result, read with Berman and Chabolla, points to a short list of design controls for any lead-generation or comparison site. Place the assent language directly adjacent to the button that submits the form, not at the bottom of the page. Say in plain words that clicking the named button means agreement to named, hyperlinked terms. Make the hyperlink look like a hyperlink, in a contrasting color and readable size. Avoid relying on notices spread across later screens. Archive dated screenshots of every version of every flow, because the proponent must prove what each plaintiff saw. A carefully drafted delegation clause or class action waiver does nothing if formation fails, since a court must first find that some agreement exists.

For defendants in data breach MDLs. An arbitration clause is often the most valuable defense in a consumer breach case, because individual arbitration with a class waiver would eliminate aggregate exposure. Nader shows that the clause can be lost on the interface alone, after a year-long appeal. Defendants with multiple brands or subsidiaries should audit each consumer entry point separately, since a ruling that one flow failed to produce assent says nothing good about the others.

For claimants' counsel. Formation is the first and often the cheapest attack on a motion to compel arbitration. It requires no showing of unconscionability and no fight over who decides arbitrability, because a court, not an arbitrator, decides whether any contract was formed. Counsel should press early for the defendant's archived screenshots, user logs and version histories of each page a plaintiff used.

For mass arbitration practice. When a defendant wins the formation fight, claimants' counsel can respond with individual demands at the AAA or JAMS and the fee pressure that mass arbitration creates. When the defendant loses, as LendingTree did, the arbitral forum disappears entirely, and so do the defendant's fee exposure under provider mass-filing rules and the claimants' leverage from it. Firms deciding whether to organize breach claimants for mass filings should weigh the strength of the defendant's formation record before choosing between a court class action and individual demands.

Frequently asked questions

What did the Ninth Circuit decide in the LendingTree Snowflake arbitration appeal?

On Nov. 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit held in Nader v. LendingTree, LLC, No. 25-7045, that LendingTree and QuoteWizard cannot compel arbitration because their websites' design did not establish mutual assent to the terms of use. The consumer claims remain in the Snowflake MDL in Montana.

Who decided the LendingTree arbitration appeal?

A three-judge panel of Judges Richard C. Tallman, Carlos T. Bea and Daniel A. Bress decided the appeal, which came from U.S. District Judge Brian Morris's Oct. 30, 2025 order in the District of Montana.

Can a website's terms of use bind users to arbitration?

Yes, but only if the website gives reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms and the user takes an action the site clearly says will mean agreement. Under Berman v. Freedom Financial Network, the company seeking arbitration must prove both, and the LendingTree websites did not meet that standard.

Does the LendingTree ruling affect mass arbitration of data breach claims?

It removes the arbitral forum for these LendingTree and QuoteWizard claims, so consumers will litigate in court as a putative class rather than file individual arbitration demands. More broadly, it shows that defendants who cannot prove formation lose both the class waiver and the arbitration forum together.

Does the ruling mean LendingTree is liable for the Snowflake breach?

No. The decision addresses only where the claims will be heard. LendingTree and QuoteWizard keep all of their defenses on liability, damages and class certification in MDL No. 3126.