Appearances, Arbitration, Blog
College of Commercial Arbitrators Meeting
Bill Bock, KGR attorney and General Counsel for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), will be a panelist at the 17th annual meeting of the College of Commercial Arbitrators (CCA) on Friday, October 13th. Bill has extensive experience with athlete eligibility matters arising under specialized rules and statutes such as the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. He was involved in one of the early arbitrations under the Sports Act in 1994 and has handled numerous arbitrations under the Act since that time. He has appeared before panels of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and/or the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in more than seventy-five (75+) sports eligibility disputes. The CAS is the specialized arbitral tribunal which handles international sport disputes. Bill has served as USADA’s General Counsel since 2007. USADA is the independent entity with the responsibility to investigate and prosecute instances of drug use in Olympic and Paralympic sports involving U.S. athletes, athlete support personnel and others, (www.usada.org). Bill has direct responsibility for the investigation of potential rule violations and handles the prosecution of cases, where those charged with a rule violation may have their case heard by a panel of neutral arbitrators. Bill was the lead attorney for USADA in the investigation of the use of performance enhancing drugs by Lance Armstrong and other members of the U.S.Postal Service Cycling Team and was the principal author of USADA’s approximately 200 page Reasoned Decision setting forth the evidence against Mr. Armstrong. For his work on the Armstrong case…
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Arbitration, Blog
Arbitration is Not a One Size Fits All Solution
Justice Hart of the Arkansas Supreme Court recently wrote a scathing dissent on the proliferation of arbitration to settle disputes. You can find a story summarizing the dissent here and the full dissent here. Whether you favor or disfavor the use of arbitration, Justice Hart raises a number of points that attorneys and clients should consider before agreeing to arbitration as a method of dispute resolution. She notes that arbitration is not often the cost saving resolution touted. She is undoubtedly correct that paying an arbitrator (or panel) is significantly more expensive than the cost of a court where a litigant is only responsible for the filing fee and court costs. Whether the total cost of arbitration is cheaper or more expensive than traditional litigation depends on the nature of the matter and the scope of discovery undertaken. Certainly if extensive discovery occurs in traditional litigation but an arbitration panel would have limited the scope of discovery, then you may spend less money through the course of the decision making process. But that begs the question, do you need the discovery? If your case hinges on discovery, are you willing to risk that discovery may be limited by the panel? Further, if you require discovery from a nonparty in traditional litigation, it can generally be compelled through issuance of a subpoena with the discovery. Virtually no additional steps are required. In arbitration however, the panel does not have the power to compel compliance with a non-party discovery request. Consequently, in order to compel a response, a…
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