you want to go through jury selection, taking several people away from their daily routine, so you can argue with T-Mobile about your phone bill?

> ...so you can argue with T-Mobile about your phone bill?

a) If it's worth the cost of hiring a lawyer and paying court fees, then yes, I'll absolutely pull in more than a dozen registered voters to do what they signed up to do when they registered to vote.

b) It's my understanding that access to Small Claims court is also often barred by these binding arbitration agreements... so even if it's small enough to not require a lawyer (let alone a jury), you may be prevented from seeking redress in open court.

> a) If it's worth the cost of hiring a lawyer and paying court fees

It's not.

> b) It's my understanding that access to Small Claims court is also often barred by these binding arbitration agreements... so even if it's small enough to not require a lawyer (let alone a jury), you may be prevented from seeking redress in open court.

Sounds like you agree that smaller situations should not escalate to a jury?

> > a) If it's worth the cost of hiring a lawyer and paying court fees > > It's not.

It's highly conditional. When parties absolutely cannot come to an agreement in disputes about matters of contract or law, that's what the courts are for. Being strongarmed into giving up access to the courts absolutely should be illegal. (Mutual pre-agreement between peer parties to go to arbitration rather than court is totally A-OK.)

> Sounds like you agree that smaller situations should not escalate to a jury?

Small Claims court exists for a very good reason, as do bench trials.

However, things that appear small (e.g. billing disputes) can be very, very large due to a multitude of factors (e.g. number of people who are "mistakenly" being incorrectly billed). That's why the court issues subpoenas, lawyers and the court issue binding demands for evidence preservation, and the entire discovery process exists. On top of that, court proceedings are by default a matter of public record; in part so others can be made aware of the misbehaviors of others... and potentially join in on an action or file one of their own if they're also a wronged party.

When one's only redress is behind closed doors and one is legally bound by NDA to not speak about the arbitration proceedings, it's dirt-simple to hide the scope of malfeasance and frustrate organized action.

You can't be spammed with jury duty in the US. And honestly, being able to actually decide for my fellow man every once in a while against BS claims sounds more impactful than "well, this person was on camera doing the crime. Open and shut".

But alas, the "will of the people" isn't used for civil suits. Wonder why (genuinely. Feels backwards for a jury to decide on something more technical like a criminal trial but not to have an opinion on civilities, which is more subjective).

Civil suits _do_ have jury trials. They’re even conducted with a lower standard of burden of proof, which is good or bad depending on if you’re potentially getting ramrodded or potentially finally past the Big CO’s lawyers.

If it sets a precedent and prevents >12 other people from having their phone bill screwed with in the same way then that's a good tradeoff.

Maybe we should tax those large corps more, and use that money to pay the jurors. ~

Maybe we need to change the legal process further to make it easy to participate and low cost.

Yes.

If these companies knew normal people would be judging them maybe they wouldn't act like dicks so often.

Smaller cases could use smaller juries though.

Imagine if you could amortize the costs and simply mandate that the state employ someone to decide these petty quabbles.

Oh wait, this reinvents the court system.

> Oh wait, this reinvents the court system.

The person you are responding to is entirely aware of that. I'm not sure what point you're making.