Earlier this week, a federal judge in Marshall, Texas reportedly ordered a guardrail manufacturer and a whistleblower to engage in mediation by the end of the year. In U.S. ex rel. Harman v. Trinity Industries Inc. et al., No. 12-00089 (E. D. Tex.), a whistleblower and company competitor, Harman, claimed that Trinity Industries changed the design of its highway guardrail heads in 2005 without notifying the Federal Highway Administration (“FHA”).

Online retailers in the United States are increasingly requiring consumers to arbitrate disputes through their terms-of-service rules. According to an article recently published in a New York Times blog, the Upshot, approximately one-third of the top 200 retail websites operating in the U.S. now uses clickwrap or browsewrap agreements to ban class action lawsuits or to require arbitration of consumer disputes.

Last week, the Supreme Court of Texas declined to consider whether an arbitral decision should be set aside based on a member of an arbitration panel’s alleged evident partiality. In Port Arthur Steam Energy LP v. Oxbow Calcining LLC, No. 01-12-01165-CV (Tex. – App. – 1st [Houston], October 22, 2013), Oxbow Calcining initiated arbitral proceedings with Port Arthur Steam Energy (“PASE”) before the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) over a number of environmental compliance costs related to an industrial facility.

Louis Del Duca, Edward N. Polisher Distinguished Faculty Scholar Emeritus and Director, Institute of Commercial Law at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law, has published Consumer Financing Pre-Dispute Mandatory Arbitration: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Developments, Uniform Commercial Code Law Journal, Vol. 46, p. 71, 2014.