Main Street Competition Coalition Warns Appeals Court: Arbitration Gamesmanship Is Shielding Dominant Firms from Antitrust Accountability
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - July 8, 2026
Media Contact: Chris Jones, Executive Director, Main Street Competition Coalition
Coalition files amicus brief in Third Circuit as Main Street faces dispute-resolution systems rigged by their most powerful trading partners
WASHINGTON, D.C. The Main Street Competition Coalition (MSCC) yesterday filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit spotlighting a growing threat to independent businesses across the American economy: dominant firms that impose mandatory arbitration clauses on their smaller trading partners, then manipulate those same procedures to escape accountability under the antitrust and competition laws.
Independent businesses and agricultural producers rarely have any real choice about the contracts they sign with the consolidated giants that control their supply chains and markets. Those take-it-or-leave-it contracts increasingly include mandatory arbitration provisions. Arbitration can be a legitimate tool for resolving disputes quickly and cheaply, but as MSCC's brief documents, market-dominant firms are increasingly treating dispute resolution as a game to be won before the merits are ever heard: litigating until the courtroom turns unfavorable and then demanding arbitration, switching arbitration forums midstream, or steering disputes into arbitration systems whose rules they helped write.
“'For too many independent businesses, arbitration clauses have become a trap. Your dominant supplier or trading partner writes the contract, picks the forum, and then changes the rules the moment you try to hold them accountable for anticompetitive conduct. If the antitrust laws are going to mean anything for Main Street, courts have to shut down this gamesmanship." said Chris Jones, Executive Director of the Main Street Competition Coalition.
MSCC filed its brief in Greystone Mortgage Inc. v. Equifax Workforce Solutions LLC (No. 26-1501), in which the district court denied Equifax's attempt to move a small-business class action into arbitration after more than a year of litigating in federal court, a maneuver the court described as "procedural gamesmanship." MSCC urges the Third Circuit to affirm and to join the growing chorus of federal courts holding that arbitration is not a "second bite at the apple" for firms facing accountability.
The Main Street Competition Coalition is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization of independent businesses and agricultural producers devoted to restoring competitive markets across the American economy.
MSCC is represented by Elliot D. Buckman and John Roberti of Zaiger Linden Roberti & Pepe LLP and Brendan Ballou of Ballou Law PLLC.