Gibson Dunn, DoorDash's Ties to New Mass Arbitration Protocol Can Be Explored, Judge Says
U.S. District Judge William Alsup also ordered the CEO of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution to sit for a deposition by lawyers representing DoorDash couriers, but denied the lawyers' request for communications the alternative dispute resolution company had with other companies.
December 20, 2019 at 04:08 PM
3 minute read
A federal judge has ordered the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, or CPR, to hand over documents involving input from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and DoorDash on a new process for handling mass arbitrations in employment cases.
At a hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California also ordered CPR president and CEO Allen Waxman to sit for a deposition by lawyers at Keller Lenkner, who represent thousands of DoorDash couriers seeking to pursue employee misclassification claims against the company before a separate arbitration provider.
Alsup, however, stopped short of granting the Keller Lenker lawyers access to all the documents they were seeking, including communications and financial information about others who gave input into the development of CPR's new "Employment-Related Mass-Claims Protocol," which launched in November. Alsup told Keller Lenkner's Warren Postman that it was "beyond the pale" to ask for nearly 30 categories of documents from CPR, a third party in the dispute between couriers and DoorDash. Alsup said the request was the equivalent of asking CPR's lawyers to "stand on their head and stack greased BBs."
The hearing comes as the Keller Lenkner lawyers accuse DoorDash and Gibson Dunn of attempting to short-circuit thousands of arbitrations its delivery workers pursued before the American Arbitration Association, or AAA. Keller Lenkner filed suit in November seeking to compel arbitration on behalf of 2,236 delivery workers, called Dashers, who had previously filed demands before AAA in August to arbitrate claims that the company misclassified them as contractors rather than employees. The firm claims that even though AAA found the plaintiffs met its requirements to proceed with arbitration, DoorDash declined to pay its portion of the arbitration fees—$1,900 per claimant.
The Keller Lenkner lawyers claim that the day after AAA administratively closed the pending arbitrations due to DoorDash's failure to pay, the company began pushing out a new arbitration agreement incorporating CPR's recently developed mass claims protocol, which includes a procedure to randomly choose 10 bellwether cases in matters where many individual employees bring the same sorts of claims against a company. The Keller Lenkner lawyers claim it could take years to resolve their clients' cases under the new protocol.
In court papers filed Thursday, Gibson Dunn denied it helped CPR draft the new mass arbitration rules, but did confirm that lawyers at the firm and DoorDash had conversations with CPR as the protocol was in development. The firm, which did not send a representative to Friday's discovery hearing before Alsup, denied there was anything "nefarious" about the six substantive phone calls it had with CPR representatives prior to the new protocols' launch.
Alsup on Friday praised CPR and its counsel, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius lawyer Kimberley Lunetta, for being "eminently reasonable" in being willing to share communications with Gibson Dunn and DoorDash. Lunetta said that her client's hope was that its "reputation as a neutral is not sullied in this process."
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