End of the Line for Anti-Arbitration Rule? Maybe Not

The rule was killed under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to review and reject government agency rules. President Trump is expected to approve the resolution. The CFPB rule, with which firms would have had until March 2018 to comply, was widely criticized by financial services organizations and others.

Despite the Senate’s vote, Pillsbury senior Litigation partner Christine Scheuneman said that this is not a situation “where companies are sitting back and saying, ‘Now we can take advantage of consumers.’ It’s a situation where they’re all having to assess what makes sense for their own businesses and their own companies.”

There have been “plenty of companies that have stopped using arbitration clauses over the years because they had just determined it didn’t make economic sense for them,” Scheuneman added. She also said consumers may favor arbitration. “Many times, a consumer simply wants to get their problem addressed,” she said, and they want to get it addressed quickly and in a very straightforward way, and that’s really one of the hallmarks of arbitration. It’s a mechanism to address consumer concerns and issues more quickly than if you brought an action to court.”