Large corporations have long sought, when possible, to remove tort cases from the courts and force them into arbitration. Arbitration is thought to be a friendlier forum for corporate interests, resulting in lesser awards to injured parties than would be expected from juries of their peers.

Arbitrations have a contractual predicate. As such, many kinds of personal injury cases—for example, a simple automobile accident between strangers or a trip-and-fall on a sidewalk—are not susceptible to arbitration, because the parties will have had no prior dealings with each other and no potential chance to have contracted before the time of the accident. But with the advent of ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft, arbitration demands in personal injury have become more common. Companies like Uber and Lyft have buried arbitration clauses in their terms of service, and then invoked them when sued by their passengers. For this reason, it is important that personal injury attorneys have some basic fluency in the principles that apply when courts are asked to evaluate when a case can or should be sent to arbitration. Many of the issues we will deal with in this column have arisen in the ride sharing context.