How the NYTimes investigated arbitration

Adam Aton of Investigative Reports and Editors writes about how New York Times reporters Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery reported and wrote a three-part series on the rise of arbitration clauses and cases.

Aton writes, “Even though arbitration hearings are opaque by design, the Times found a few ways to glean enough data to discern some trends. Silver-Greenberg knew California law requires any arbitration company operating in the state to open their entire docket to the public, Gebeloff said, creating a window into every case arbitrated across the country. But it was messy.

“Some companies didn’t follow California’s law, and the state didn’t enforce any sort of uniform reporting standards. Even within a single company, different arbitrators disclosed different information in different formats, Gebeloff said. It wasn’t unusual for arbitrators to leave key sections blank.

“‘The only thing we’d know was a case had been held involving a certain company,’ he said. ‘And that would pretty much be it.’

“Nonetheless, Gebeloff began scraping, parsing and pulling the dockets. Standardization was the name of the game; he came up with 25,000 arbitration files, and he created some basic rules for appending the data fields to one another. That made it easier to stack the data into clear categories — the companies, the judges, the outcomes — and it also demonstrated which questions they could answer with their limited dataset. One of the most important trends revealed in the data was how often the same arbitrators handled cases for a single company, creating the appearance of clientelism.”

Read more here.