Court Opinion

ID: 9779647
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 00:31:07.012135+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:33:37.383281
License: Public Domain

PRESIDING JUSTICE HOLDRIDGE, specially concurring: I concur with the judgment to affirm the trial court’s order denying the plaintiffs motion to lift the stay. I write separately to assert my position that the Federal Arbitration Act (9 U.S.C. §3 (2006)) does not control the outcome of this case as the only question is whether the trial court abused its discretion in granting a stay of the instant litigation pending the outcome of the class action lawsuit in New York, an action which was not covered by the Federal Arbitration Act. A trial court’s decision to grant or deny a motion to stay will not be overturned unless the court abused its discretion in ruling upon the motion. See May v. SmithKline Beecham Clinical Laboratories, Inc., 304 Ill. App. 3d 242, 246 (1999). An abuse of discretion does not occur when a reviewing court merely disagrees with the trial court’s decision but, instead, when a reviewing court finds that the trial court “acted arbitrarily without the employment of conscientious judgment or, in view of all the circumstances, exceeded the bounds of reason and ignored recognized principles of law so that substantial prejudice resulted.” (Internal quotation marks omitted.) May, 304 Ill. App. 3d at 246. While I agree that the trial court in the instant matter did not abuse its discretion in denying the plaintiffs motion to lift the stay, I would limit this ruling to the particular facts of this case. Here, the trial court determined that it was in the best interest of judicial economy that the matter should be stayed pending the outcome of the New York class action. The trial court reasoned that both matters involved the same parties and the same claims. Most importantly to the trial court was the fact that, since JP Morgan had engaged in the same alleged fraudulent conduct with other investors throughout the country, discovery in the instant matter would significantly overlap and duplicate the discovery taking place in the class action. While a reviewing court might disagree with this reasoning, it cannot be said that the trial court’s decision exceeded the bounds of reason or was otherwise contrary to law. For this reason alone, I would affirm the trial court’s ruling. I write separately to note my disagreement with the proposition that the trial court’s ruling was mandated by the Federal Arbitration Act. Here, the trial court denied JP Morgan’s motion to compel arbitration and the propriety of that ruling is not before this court. Thus, no arbitration action was pending, and the Federal Arbitration Act had no applicability to this cause of action. The Federal Arbitration Act only requires a stay of proceedings where the issue before the court is “referable to arbitration under an agreement in writing for such arbitration.” 9 U.S.C. §3 (2006). Here, the court had determined that the issue before it was not referable to arbitration. Thus, the stay provision of the Federal Arbitration Act was inapplicable. I would, therefore, find that the Federal Arbitration Act did not mandate that the trial court stay the proceedings pending the outcome of the New York class action. Since the trial court’s ruling on the stay was not an abuse of discretion, I would affirm the stay order on that basis alone.