Most of the big banks have them. It's probably more than that for credit cards. Lund says arbitration clauses started showing up in 1985, but the trend boomed in the '90s beginning with Bank of America. In 1992, the lending giant announced that credit card and checking and savings account disputes would be resolved out of court. Lenders are very excited about arbitration clauses because they tend to spend a lot of money defending class-action suits.
Courts routinely use arbitrators to relieve the clogged legal system.
In fact, some of them require arbitration of civil cases such as family and divorce disputes before a lawsuit can be filed. Just about any type of dispute, whether it's between a worker and an employer, a retailer and a customer, or an insurance company and a policyholder, can be arbitrated. The majority of big business arbitration cases are handled by the American Arbitration Association , the National Arbitration Forum and Jams Endispute , all of which have long rosters of experts in the law and other fields. Attorneys agree that arbitration has its advantages. For one, it's faster.