Fridge failures: LG says angry owners can't sue, company points to cardboard box

[mahatmakanejeeves]

9. From the article:

To learn more about arbitration agreements and notices, we visited professor Anna Han at Santa Clara University School of Law. “I’ve been teaching here for 35 years,” she said.

Han noted that Arbitration agreements are commonplace. “They put them into everything,” she said. And, these days, consumers agree to mandatory arbitration all the time-- click here, sign there.

Han says proper notice is key: both sides must knowingly agree not to sue. We asked if arbitration notices printed on a box, taped inside a product, or included in a manual -- that you don’t see until after you buy -- give shoppers sufficient notice. Han noted parallels to a case in which Samsung tried to force arbitration with a notice in a smartphone box.

“In that case the court said exactly what you just asked: which is, ‘Was there sufficient notice to the consumer about this clause,’” Han said. “Was there actual consent? If you don’t know something, how would you ever agree to it, right?”

Han said the federal courts nullified the arbitration agreement in the smartphone box. The judge has not ruled whether LG owners’ boxes boxed them into arbitration. Mouzari says the legal maneuvering does nothing to repair people’s problem fridges. “Instead of fixing the issue, LG decided to allocate those resources into an arbitration provision on a box,” she said.