More than 1,000 individuals have retained a New York-based law firm, Bursor & Fisher, to oppose AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA by filing challenges to the merger through arbitration.
“AT&T’s contracts give every customer the right to arbitration," said Scott A. Bursor, one of the attorneys representing AT&T customers, in a statement Tuesday.
Bursor & Fisher, which has launched a website, said the American Arbitration Association has begun administering the cases despite AT&T’s objection that arbitrators lack authority to block the merger.
“Our 236-page arbitration demand lays out the extensive evidence demonstrating that this merger will cause serious harm to consumers," said Barry Davis, a Miami-based trial lawyer working with Bursor & Fisher. “We’ve hired experts who are prepared to testify at arbitration hearings across the country, and we will soon have more than one thousand arbitration cases on file, any one of which could stop this merger."
AT&T claims the AAA has no authority whatsoever to affect a merger that federal and state regulators are reviewing.
“This action is a waste of time and money because AT&T’s arbitration agreement with our customers – recently upheld by the Supreme Court – allows individual relief for individual claims," an AT&T spokesman said. “It specifically prohibits any proceeding seeking broad relief like the Bursor & Fisher law firm has filed."
AT&T’s arbitration agreement, the spokesman added, “allows an arbitrator to award individual relief, not large-scale, class-wide relief impacting more than 100 million people in a single stroke."
The spokesman said AT&T hasn't filed anything with the courts to date in order to dismiss the cases before the AAA, but the company is considering its options.
Bursor & Fisher is employing a creative strategy to challenge AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile: Use AT&T’s wireless customer contracts to oppose the transaction through binding arbitration in hundreds and potentially thousands of individual cases.
