Arbitration—The SCOTX Report

24-0135·Petition For Review

In a lease dispute over a rent-adjusting appraisal, where the parties invoked arbitration's impartiality principles, communications between one side and a prospective neutral appraiser about the dispute and about hiring him as a party appraiser must be disclosed to the other side, and the undisclosed communications here created a reasonable impression of partiality.
The Court reversed the trial court's order confirming the appraisal valuation and remanded, leaving in place the unchallenged remainder of the judgment and declining to narrow or overrule Burlington Northern v. TUCO or to decide whether appraisers generally must meet arbitrators' disclosure requirements.

24-0273·Petition For Review

When an arbitration agreement's validity is undisputed and it clearly and unmistakably delegates questions of "scope, arbitrability, or validity" to the arbitrator, a party's argument that the agreement does not extend to a later visit to the same trampoline park is a challenge to scope, not to the agreement's existence, and it must be decided by the arbitrator.
Courts decide whether an arbitration agreement exists, including when a later agreement supersedes it, but framing an applicability question as one of "existence" as to particular claims collapses the existence and scope inquiries, as the Court held in TotalEnergies.

24-0905·Petition For Review

Whether a plaintiff who agreed to arbitrate "any dispute or claim" with a trampoline park, in a release that delegates arbitrability to the arbitrator, can avoid arbitration by also suing the park's nonsignatory affiliates and owners, or whether those nonsignatories can enforce the agreement as parties, third-party beneficiaries, or through intertwined-claims estoppel.
Whether a minor's lawsuit disaffirms a parent-signed release and its arbitration clause, and whether the court of appeals could compel arbitration against the park on an incomplete mandamus record with no reporter's record.

25-0686·Petition For Review

Justice Busby dissented from the denial of review in a dispute over whether a contract's arbitration clause (incorporating the AAA Rules) or its separate "notwithstanding anything to the contrary" provision reserving injunctive-relief claims for court controls the threshold question of who decides arbitrability.
He argued Texas courts of appeals need guidance on what limiting language defeats delegation of arbitrability to an arbitrator, since this contract's notwithstanding clause should override the AAA Rules under ordinary contract-interpretation principles, and he would have granted the petition to resolve it.

25-0983·Petition For Review

Whether a trial court that held hearings on applications to compel arbitration and then issued a notice setting the case for a jury trial, without ruling expressly, implicitly denied the applications, so that the applicants have the statutory right to an interlocutory appeal, or merely deferred the ruling.
If so, whether the underlying lawsuit must be sent back to arbitration because a valid agreement exists, the parties clearly delegated arbitrability to the arbitrator, and no legitimate challenge allows the court to decide it.

25-0988·Petition For Review

The Court sent this case back to the court of appeals to reconsider in light of a new U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Federal Arbitration Act's exemption for transportation workers, without deciding the question itself.

25-0994·Petition For Review

Whether a former employee who says she cannot recall or confirm signing an electronic arbitration agreement raises a genuine fact dispute over contract formation, requiring the trial court to hold an evidentiary hearing before compelling arbitration, when the employer offered its CEO's declaration describing the security procedure for electronic signatures.
Whether the court of appeals applied an unduly rigid reading of Aerotek, Inc. v. Boyd and Business and Commerce Code section 322.009(a) (the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act) in holding the employer had to enumerate every security procedure attending the signing.

25-1073·Petition For Review

Whether a mother's employment arbitration agreement, which covers claims "by or with respect to" her and her children and delegates arbitrability to the arbitrator, binds her unborn son's survival and wrongful-death claims, which his father and mother now assert, even though the child was never a signatory.
Whether the court or the arbitrator decides arbitrability as to the non-signatory unborn child, and if the court, whether any recognized doctrine (parental authority, ratification, or direct-benefits estoppel) binds the child's claims to the agreement.

26-0107·Mandamus

Must trial-court proceedings be stayed automatically while an interlocutory appeal from the denial of a motion to compel arbitration is pending, as Coinbase v. Bielski requires in federal court, or may a Texas court of appeals deny a stay in its discretion?
If the court of appeals had discretion, did it abuse it by denying the stay, and does the "frivolous appeal" exception to the federal stay rule apply through Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 51.016?