ABSTRACT
Mass arbitration has rapidly emerged as a novel, fast-growing, and highly contested development in the contemporary US dispute resolution landscape. Existing scholarship explains its rise through Federal Arbitration Act jurisprudence, claiming economics, and strategic responses to class action waivers. This Article identifies a critical and underexplored fourth driver: technology. It argues that mass arbitration is a fundamentally technologically mediated phenomenon, made possible through an extensive techno-procedural framework that transforms high-volume individual claims into coordinated, scalable claim portfolios-from client acquisition by the plaintiffs’ bar through arbitral proceedings and post-award administration. More broadly, the Article shows that mass arbitration functions as a ‘techno-procedural innovation lab’, offering a distinctive case study of how legal technology can operate to narrow, rather than exacerbate, the access-to-justice gap.
The Article makes three contributions. First, it provides the first systematic account of the technologies deployed by plaintiffs’ lawyers to represent large numbers of clients in mass arbitration. These include digital and AI-enabled systems for intake and outreach, case mining, claim vetting, client and case management, document generation, and settlement and post-award administration. Second, the Article shows that arbitral institutions have developed novel dispute system design (DSD) features in response to mass arbitration by redesigning both procedural rules and technological infrastructure. These include structured digital intake and verification of claims, centralized electronic service, tools for arbitrator selection and appointment, and virtual hearings-all supported by API-enabled data exchange. Finally, the Article advances a broader claim: arbitral institutions are well positioned to serve as ‘techno-procedural innovation labs’, capable of generating, testing, and refining novel DSDs that may inform reforms across the civil justice system. Their procedural agility, technological capacity, and market-driven incentives enable them to outpace courts, which remain constrained by regulatory, institutional, and legacy technological limitations. Building on this account, the Article argues that mass arbitration demonstrates how technology can be mobilized to support vulnerable claimants through scalable yet individualized representation and dispute resolution, and that these innovations may inform future civil justice reforms, particularly in high-volume domains such as debt collection and landlord-tenant litigation.
Sela, Ayelet, Technologies of Mass Arbitration (October 29, 2025). Forthcoming in the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution (subject to edits).
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