Mass arbitration is a litigation strategy where a plaintiffs' firm files dozens, hundreds, or thousands of nearly identical individual arbitration demands simultaneously against a single corporate defendant — turning the company's own arbitration clause into a financial weapon.
For decades, corporations inserted mandatory arbitration clauses into consumer and employment contracts to prevent class actions. Mass arbitration flips that logic entirely. Because each claim must be individually administered, companies face enormous, unavoidable filing fees regardless of the merits — creating overwhelming settlement pressure before a single case reaches a hearing.
The strategy gained its critical legal foundation from the Supreme Court's 2018 Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis decision, which upheld class action waivers in arbitration agreements. With the class action door closed, plaintiff-side attorneys innovated a new approach: flood the arbitration system with individual claims en masse.
Today it has evolved into a sophisticated, technology-enabled practice supported by litigation funding, proprietary client intake software, and specialized firms managing hundreds of thousands of simultaneous claimants.
My take: what surprised me most when building this resource was how few plaintiffs' attorneys understood that digital marketing infrastructure — not legal strategy — is what separates a 500-claimant campaign from a 50,000-claimant campaign. The law is only half the equation. — Brian Beck