Walgreens Arbitration Ruling: Judge Seeborg Splits Health-Data Plaintiffs by the Screen They Saw

The Walgreens arbitration ruling in N.G. v. Walgreen Co. splits four health-data plaintiffs down the middle: Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California compelled two Walgreens.com users to individual arbitration and held that two others, who only booked vaccine appointments, never agreed to arbitrate at all. The order, reported on Oct. 27, 2026, matters because it turns on the exact screen each plaintiff saw, which means Walgreen's ability to keep its website-privacy exposure out of court, and out of a class action, will be decided one interface at a time.

The case, No. 3:26-cv-02994-RS, is a putative class action filed on April 7, 2026, alleging that Walgreen Co. shared users' protected health information from its website in violation of federal wiretap statutes and California law. Walgreen moved to compel arbitration under the Arbitration Agreement in its Terms of Use. Seeborg granted the motion as to two plaintiffs, including N.G., and denied it as to plaintiffs R.L. and I.P.

What did the court decide in the Walgreens arbitration case?

The court decided that contract formation, not the reach of the arbitration clause, was the dispositive question, and that it had to be answered separately for each plaintiff. Seeborg framed the inquiry the way Ninth Circuit courts do on any Motion to Compel Arbitration: first, whether a valid agreement to arbitrate exists; second, whether it covers the dispute. Because Walgreen's terms plainly reach privacy claims if they bind the user, the case came down to step one.

On that step, the order describes the determinations as highly fact-bound and notes that the different user interfaces each plaintiff encountered "may yield different results." The result:

Plaintiff	How they used Walgreens.com	Interface at issue	Agreement formed?	Outcome
N.G.	Created a Walgreens.com account in 2021	Account-creation screen with a checkbox beside "I read and agree to the Walgreens Terms of Use"	Yes	Compelled to individual arbitration
Second compelled plaintiff	Walgreens.com user	Not detailed in reported excerpts	Yes	Compelled to individual arbitration
R.L.	Booked vaccine appointments; no permanent account	Vaccine-scheduling page with a checkbox next to a larger text block, assent line last	No	Claims proceed in federal court
I.P.	Booked vaccine appointments; no permanent account, returned for later appointments	Same vaccine-scheduling flow	No	Claims proceed in federal court

Public reports of the order identify N.G. by initials and do not detail the second compelled plaintiff's interface; this table reflects only what the order excerpts and trade coverage state.

Why were two Walgreens plaintiffs sent to arbitration?

N.G. was sent to arbitration because the 2021 account-creation screen that plaintiff used paired a checkbox with an express statement referencing the Terms of Use, and Walgreen supplied that interface without dispute from the plaintiffs. Seeborg was careful about labels. He held that the screen was not a clickwrap "as the Ninth Circuit understands that term," because the user is never shown the terms themselves and need not open them before assenting. He characterized it instead as a form of sign-in wrap, the hybrid that tells users that signing up or checking a box signifies agreement to terms available by hyperlink.

That classification matters in the Ninth Circuit. A true clickwrap, where the full terms are displayed and the user must click "I agree," is almost always enforced. A sign-in wrap is enforced only if it clears the two-part test from Berman v. Freedom Financial Network, LLC, 30 F.4th 849 (9th Cir. 2022): the website must give reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms, and the user must take an action, such as checking a box or clicking a button, that unambiguously manifests assent to them. The 2021 account screen cleared both prongs. A checkbox tied directly to a sentence saying the user had read and agreed to the Terms of Use is about as clean a manifestation of assent as a sign-in wrap can offer, and the act of creating an account signals an ongoing relationship in which a reasonable user expects terms to govern.

The compelled plaintiffs' claims now go to the American Arbitration Association (AAA). According to summaries of Walgreens' current Terms of Use, arbitration is administered by the AAA under its consumer rules as modified by the agreement, Illinois law governs the merits, and the parties must attempt informal negotiation for 60 days after a Notice of Dispute before anyone files a Demand for Arbitration.

Why did the vaccine-appointment plaintiffs avoid arbitration?

R.L. and I.P. avoided arbitration because the court found that the vaccine-scheduling page did not give them reasonably conspicuous notice that they were agreeing to the Terms of Use, so no contract formed. Two features drove that result.

The first was context. The order reasons that signing up for a single vaccine appointment "does not necessarily trigger alarms" that a user is creating an ongoing relationship with the provider. Neither R.L. nor I.P. created a permanent account on Walgreens.com, and the court did not treat their later return visits for additional appointments as changing that picture. Under Berman and its successors, the nature of the transaction informs what a reasonable user expects: someone opening an account anticipates terms of service; someone booking a one-off shot at the corner pharmacy may not.

The second was design. The checkbox on the vaccine page sat next to a much larger block of text, and the line indicating that the user agreed to the Terms of Use was buried at the last line of that paragraph. A notice that a reasonable user would have to dig to the bottom of a paragraph to find is not reasonably conspicuous, and checking a box whose meaning is ambiguous does not unambiguously manifest assent to arbitration.

Walgreen argued that neither R.L. nor I.P. had attested to understanding the page the way they described. Seeborg rejected that framing: contract formation is governed by an objective test, so what matters is what a reasonably prudent user would have understood from the screen, not what any individual plaintiff subjectively thought. That cuts both ways. It means plaintiffs cannot escape a well-designed screen by swearing they never read it, but it also means a defendant cannot rescue a poorly designed screen by pointing to the absence of a plaintiff's declaration.

Can the Walgreens health-data lawsuit proceed as a class action?

Yes, for now, the Walgreens health-data lawsuit can proceed as a putative class action with R.L. and I.P. as named plaintiffs, because the court found they never agreed to arbitrate or to the class action waiver in the same Terms of Use. The ruling does not certify any class, and it does not address the merits of the wiretap or California privacy claims.

The practical shape of any eventual class is the more interesting question. If users who created accounts on the 2021-style screen are bound to arbitrate, Walgreen will argue at Class Certification that a large share of the putative class is subject to the same arbitration clause and Class Action Waiver, defeating Predominance or requiring a narrowed class definition. The plaintiffs, conversely, have every incentive to define a class around guest and appointment-only users who encountered interfaces like the vaccine page. Expect the fight over which interfaces were live, for which users, and on which dates to move from the arbitration motion into class discovery.

How the Walgreens ruling fits Ninth Circuit sign-in wrap law

N.G. v. Walgreen Co. applies, rather than extends, a line of Ninth Circuit authority that has made sign-in wraps markedly harder to enforce since 2022.

Decision	Court and year	Holding relevant to Walgreens
Berman v. Freedom Financial Network	9th Cir., 2022	Two-part test: reasonably conspicuous notice plus an action that unambiguously manifests assent; notices there were too inconspicuous and not tied to any user act
Chabolla v. ClassPass	9th Cir., Feb. 27, 2025 (2-1)	Users not bound by a sign-in wrap where the first screen's notice was distant from action items and outside the user's natural flow
Godun v. JustAnswer	9th Cir., 2025	Confirmed the conspicuousness and objective-manifestation test; underlining alone did not identify a hyperlink lacking contrasting color
Successfulmatch.com decision	9th Cir., Aug. 26, 2025	Conspicuousness turns on the totality of the circumstances; rejected a bright-line hyperlink-color rule; a checkbox followed by "Agree to both the Service Agreement and Privacy Policy" manifested assent
N.G. v. Walgreen Co.	N.D. Cal., Oct. 2026	2021 account checkbox with "I read and agree" binds; vaccine-page assent line buried in a text block does not

Read together, the cases sort into a pattern Walgreen's split result illustrates almost perfectly. A checkbox with a short, direct statement of agreement that sits where the user is already looking tends to be enforced, as in the Successfulmatch.com decision and N.G.'s 2021 screen. A notice that is visually subordinate, placed away from the button, or embedded in surrounding text tends to fail, as in Chabolla and the vaccine page. Seeborg has applied the same discipline before: in Wong v. LaserAway, he denied a motion to compel after finding that even a reasonably conspicuous notice of a website's Terms and Conditions did not establish the user's unambiguous manifestation of assent.

A comparable split has surfaced across the retail-health sector. In October 2025, a California federal judge refused to send to arbitration a proposed class action accusing Walmart of sharing data about sensitive health products bought on its website, finding the terms of service were not prominent enough to form an agreement. Walgreens fared better than Walmart only where its screen was better.

Does the Walgreens ruling affect pending mass arbitration claims?

The Walgreens ruling does not decide any pending arbitration, but it bears directly on the Mass Arbitration strategy some plaintiffs' firms are already running against the company. Labaton Keller Sucharow has said it is pursuing private arbitration claims on behalf of California and Pennsylvania customers who ordered over-the-counter treatments, tests, or medical devices from Walgreens online, alleging that purchase information was shared with third-party advertisers, and it tells prospective claimants that successful claims could be worth up to $5,000 under state privacy laws. That figure tracks the $5,000-per-violation statutory damages available under the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

The N.G. order sharpens the trade-off for both sides of that docket:

• For claimants who created accounts through a screen like N.G.'s, the order strengthens the case that they are bound to arbitrate individually, which is exactly where a mass-arbitration program wants them. Walgreen pays the bulk of AAA Initiation Fee and Arbitrator Compensation costs under consumer rules, and the economics of thousands of individual filings are the leverage.
• For guest and appointment-only users, the order suggests Walgreen may not be able to enforce arbitration at all. If Walgreen resists an arbitration demand from such a user on formation grounds, it risks conceding that the same users can join a court class action. If it accepts the demand, it pays arbitration fees for claimants who might never have been bound.
• For Walgreen, the cleanest path is consistency: a defendant that argues formation in court for some users and against it in arbitration for others invites a Waiver of Arbitration or estoppel fight.

What it means for drafters, defendants and claimants' counsel

For contract drafters and product teams. The Walgreens order is a reminder that the enforceability of an arbitration clause is decided by the user interface, not the clause. Every flow that can create a customer relationship, including guest checkout, appointment booking, prescription refills, and loyalty enrollment, needs its own assent mechanism with a short, standalone statement of agreement next to the checkbox or button. Burying the assent line at the end of a block of appointment disclosures is the specific failure Seeborg identified. Teams should also keep dated screenshots or archived builds of every flow, since Walgreen won on N.G. in part because it produced the 2021 interface and the plaintiffs did not dispute it.

For defense counsel. The order confirms that a motion to compel will be decided plaintiff by plaintiff in the Northern District of California. Declarations should map each named plaintiff to the exact flow, date and version they used, and briefs should not rely on the absence of a plaintiff's subjective understanding, which the court treated as irrelevant under the objective test. Where a court compels some plaintiffs, Smith v. Spizzirri, 601 U.S. 472 (2024), requires a stay of their claims under Section 3 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) on request; whether and how the remaining court claims proceed is a separate question.

For claimants' counsel. Plaintiff selection is now strategy. Named plaintiffs who used appointment-only or guest flows give a putative class its best chance of staying in court, while account holders on clean checkbox screens are better candidates for individual or mass arbitration. Discovery into which interfaces were live on which dates, and for which categories of users, may determine the size of any class.

For health-data and privacy litigators generally. With SB 690 having left California Invasion of Privacy Act wiretap claims under section 631 in place, pixel and tracker suits against pharmacies, hospitals and retailers will keep arriving, and formation challenges to sign-in wraps are becoming the first contested motion in many of them.

What happens next in N.G. v. Walgreen Co.?

The compelled plaintiffs' claims move toward individual AAA arbitration under Walgreens' Terms of Use, subject to the 60-day informal negotiation period. R.L. and I.P.'s claims remain before Seeborg, where the next contested stage is likely a motion to dismiss the wiretap and California law counts, followed by discovery and an eventual class certification motion. An order denying a motion to compel arbitration is immediately appealable under 9 U.S.C. § 16(a), so Walgreen may ask the Ninth Circuit to review the R.L. and I.P. ruling, and under Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski (2023) district court proceedings on those claims would be automatically stayed while any such appeal is pending. No notice of appeal had been reported as of Oct. 28, 2026.

FAQ

What is the Walgreens arbitration ruling?

The Walgreens arbitration ruling is Judge Richard Seeborg's order in N.G. v. Walgreen Co., No. 3:26-cv-02994-RS (N.D. Cal.), reported Oct. 27, 2026, granting in part and denying in part Walgreen's motions to compel arbitration of a website health-data privacy class action. Two plaintiffs were compelled to arbitrate; two were not.

Why did some Walgreens users avoid arbitration?

Plaintiffs R.L. and I.P. avoided arbitration because the vaccine-scheduling page they used placed the Terms of Use assent line at the end of a large text block beside the checkbox, and booking a one-off appointment did not signal an ongoing relationship, so no arbitration agreement formed.

Is a checkbox enough to form an arbitration agreement online?

A checkbox can be enough in the Ninth Circuit if it sits beside a clear statement of agreement and the terms are reasonably conspicuous, as with N.G.'s 2021 Walgreens.com account screen; it is not enough if the assent language is buried or ambiguous, as on the vaccine page.

What claims are in the Walgreens health-data lawsuit?

The plaintiffs allege that Walgreen shared users' protected health information from its website in violation of federal wiretap statutes and California law. The order on arbitration does not resolve the merits of those claims.

Can Walgreens appeal the arbitration ruling?

Yes. Under 9 U.S.C. § 16(a), Walgreen may immediately appeal the denial of its motion to compel as to R.L. and I.P., and under Coinbase v. Bielski a timely appeal would automatically stay district court proceedings on those claims.

Does the ruling affect Walgreens mass arbitration claims?

Not directly, but it signals that Walgreens.com account holders on similar checkbox screens are likely bound to individual AAA arbitration, while guest or appointment-only users may not be bound at all, which shapes how claimants' firms build mass arbitration and class inventories.