McKenzie Check Advance of Florida, LLC v. Betts

NCLC urged the Florida Supreme Court to hold that a state may not declare arbitration agreements to be unenforceable merely because they preclude class treatment of claims. In this case, the lower court - relying chiefly on testimony by plaintiffs’ lawyers who said that they would not handle the types of individual claims brought by the plaintiffs - improperly concluded that “[t]he inability to bring a class action suit against [the defendants] would eviscerate the remedial purposes of the relied-upon [consumer protection] statutes” and thus would violate Florida public policy. NCLC argued that the plaintiffs' self-serving legal theory would allow all Florida plaintiffs to evade their arbitration agreements by an easy maneuver: All their lawyers would need to do is recruit trial-bar colleagues to offer self-serving testimony asserting that class actions are indispensable. If arbitration agreements could be avoided by that simple ruse, such a rule of Florida law would be as “toothless and malleable” as an anti-arbitration California rule that the Supreme Court struck down in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. NCLC also urged the Florida Supreme Court to find that arbitration agreements do not violate Florida's public policy because they allow a fair and efficient resolution of consumer disputes.

This case has not been decided on the merits.
 

Amicus brief filed on 07/01/11.