The Expert's Examiner

FINRA Dispute Resolution Services (“DRS”) posted case statistics through July, with past trends persisting. 

The headlines are: while overall arbitration filings are up 8%, customer claims are down 10% and industry disputes remain up (plus 39%). Industry claims remain almost half (47%) of all new filings. Overall arbitration turnaround times remained 15.2 months, with hearing cases taking 14.4 months. There were 266 mediation cases in agreement, a 20% decrease. The settlement rate remains extremely high at 88%. There are now 7,991 DRS arbitrators, 3,762 public and 4,229 non-public; these figures are down slightly across the board. Last, FINRA DRS has unveiled a new category, “Virtual Arbitration Hearings.” Through July: 32 cases were conducted with one or more hearings via Zoom (14 customer and 18 industry). There were 32 joint motions for virtual hearings (7 customer and 25 industry cases).

(ed: *Kudos the DRS for the new stat; people want to know! **As we’ve said many times before, while there is no sustained pandemic-induced surge yet in customer disputes, such claims usually take a while to develop. If past is prologue, customer cases will surge in the fall. ***As we’ve said before, we expect there will be a flurry of under-the-wire expungement requests ahead of the effective date of the mid-September expungement fee increases. Unfortunately, we won't be able to verify that, because FINRA-DRS does not break out expungement claims in its (otherwise) comprehensive monthly statistical reports. We do note that intra-industry disputes are way up so far this year, and increased by a healthy amount in July. ****We said in SAA 2020-27 (Jul. 22): “Looks to us like the pending cases count is going up, most likely because parties in a number of cases are awaiting resumption of in-person hearings.” We tested out that theory after the June stats come out and again after the latest stats were posted, and the chart below again seems to bear out our theory:

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