Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and much more time intensive court process. However, lots of big businesses became obsessed with the concept as well, and, as we've covered over the years, that's resulted in them spending much of the early 2000s turning the system to their advantage.

First, they built in arbitration clauses to agreements that effectively blocked certain types of lawsuits with "binding" arbitration, which the Supreme Court said was fine. Then they said that unalterable "click-wrap" agreements with binding arbitration clauses could take away your rights to go to court. And the people studying arbitration results quickly learned that the businesses quite frequently win any arbitration claim, in part because the company is the one hiring the arbitrator, and if they side against the company too often, guess who isn't getting hired again later?

So, forced arbitration agreements, for a while, turned into a method for big companies to screw over customers, users, employees and more.

But... over the last few years, we've been highlighting how people have started to fight back against the companies who forced arbitration on them by flooding them with arbitration claims. Don't want to deal with class action lawsuits? Fine, how about a few hundred arbitration claims, each one you have to deal with separately? Amusingly, over the last few years, the same folks who spent decades twisting the arbitration system to their own advantage have been flipping out, now that arbitration claims have become a form of distributed denial of service attack in protest to the company's bad behavior.

Now, as you well know, in the last few months, Elon Musk has laid off a huge percentage of Twitter's former employees. When he took over the company it had around 7,500 employees. Within a month that number was closer to 2,500. The most recent report I've seen is that the company is down to around 1,000 employees. So, approximately 6,500 employees are gone.

Another important point: part of the purchase agreement that Musk signed (but apparently did not read very carefully, given his hilariously inept attempt to get out of it) was that employees under Musk's ownership would get "substantially comparable benefits" to what they had under the old company, including severance payments.

Of course, for a while, Musk, who verbally promised three months severance (which was below what the company had previously offered, and really only one month, since the first two months were required by the WARN Act, and were actually just continuing salary, since he had to give 60 days of notice for a layoff) refused to provide employees with any severance documentation. Then, when the documentation finally came, it was way less than they expected. They also included gag orders and giving up legal rights.

Many employees chose to fight this, including suing the company. But, those old pesky arbitration clauses meant that some of the lawsuits were dismissed, with the judge telling employees they had to go to arbitration, instead.

It turns out that many of them did. 1,986 former Twitter employees have filed arbitration claims. And Twitter's lawyers at the big law firm of Morgan Lewis are flipping out about it. They're asking the arbitrators if they can combine the discovery process so they don't have to go through 1,986 separate discovery efforts.

Twitter's lawyers note that there are four law firms handling the majority of the cases, with the largest (by far) being Lichten & Liss-Riordan (Shannon Liss-Riordan made herself known to Twitter employees basically as soon as Musk took over, so it's not surprising that the majority of ex-employees went to her firm). Apparently 1,848 of the 1,986 arbitration cases have all come from this firm.

And while Morgan Lewis tried to get the firm to agree to a combined discovery plan, the firm has apparently rejected it (another high profile firm, run by another high profile lawyer, Lisa Bloom, apparently was willing to agree for the 49 cases that firm represented).

Apparently Twitter's lawyers hasn't met with the other law firms that have brought arbitration claims yet. But, it seems they're freaked out by the prospect of having to handle 1,848 separate discovery efforts. The firm also notes that they wouldn't be surprised if Liss-Riordan seeks to depose Elon Musk for each of the nearly 2,000 claims, because why not?

The law firm is even arguing that if there need to be depositions, they should be universal across all four firms that are representing claims, or otherwise even having people give four separate depositions for each firm would be too much. Well, yeah, maybe Twitter should have thought of that before laying off everyone without providing them the proper severance? Just saying.

Either way, Twitter's lawyers basically beg JAMS (basically the biggest arbitration firm, which will be handling most of the claims) to let it effectively force the law firms to accept the company's proposed universal discovery protocol.

And, it seems like there's a decent change that JAMS will agree. I mean, as fun as it would be to have to watch Twitter have to deal with 2,000 independent discovery requests, the company's lawyers are not wrong to say much of it would be duplicative. The real question, though is how this can be done that recognizes that many of the 2,000 employees may actually have somewhat different claims that require somewhat different discovery demands.

Either way, it's noteworthy that so many ex-employees are claiming a breach of contract.