Click the link to avoid waiver

An arbitration panel, organized under the rules of the Houston Bar Association, awarded a substantial sum to an attorney in a fee dispute with his former client. The client sought vacatur on the ground that it not know the non-attorney member of the panel worked for a large law firm (to paraphrase Claude Rains’s character in Casablanca, it was shocked, SHOCKED to make this discovery). The Fifth Circuit found this argument waived, and did not accept the client’s argument that waiver should be limited to vacatur based on conflicts of interest: “We therefore conclude that Light-Age waived its objection to Davis’s participation on the panel. Light-Age had constructive knowledge that Davis worked for a law firm at the time of the arbitration hearing; it could have discovered that Jackson Walker was a law firm simply by clicking on the link provided in Davis’s email signature or running a brief internet search. It is reasonable to expect even a pro se litigant to perform such basic research into its arbitrator.” Ashcroft-Smith v. Light-Age, Inc., No. 18-20098 (April 25, 2019) (emphasis added).