Failure to Designate Arb Forum Voids Jenny Craig Agreement //NJ Law Journal

The latest Appellate Decision voiding a mandatory arbitration clause focused on a failure of a "meeting of the minds" because the Jenny Craig arbitration clause did not designate a forum.  But it apparently required the 82 year old employee making a New Jersey law Against Discrimination Claim to arbitrate in California with substantial filing fees.
The Court might have been better off to refuse to enforce the contract on grounds it is unconscionable to compel the twenty year eighty two year old plaintiff to prosecute her age discrimination claim 3,000 miles from home.  - gwc
Failure to Designate Arb Forum Voids Jenny Craig Agreement //NJ La Journal

In a precedent-setting opinion in New Jersey, a state appeals court has invalidated an arbitration agreement between a former Jenny Craig employee and the company, ruling that the failure to designate an arbitration forum or process meant that their supposed contract lacked a “meeting of the minds.”

Wednesday’s Appellate Division decision means that Marilyn Flanzman, a former longtime Jenny Craig employee, is allowed to press her age-discrimination and harassment lawsuit against the company in court.

Failing “to identify in the arbitration agreement the general process for selecting an arbitration mechanism or setting … deprived the parties from knowing what rights replaced their right to judicial adjudication,” the court said.

The panel, however, noted that “we do not impose any special language that parties must use in an arbitration agreement,” which “would violate Kindred Nursing [v. Clark], Atalese [v. U.S. Legal Services Group], and the other cases that preclude subjecting arbitration agreements to more burdensome requirements than other contractual agreements.”

Flanzman contends in her suit against Jenny Craig that as she aged, the company gradually—and discriminatorily—reduced her full-time hours at a Paramus location to just three hours per week. Then it allegedly fired her when she was 82, after she’d been employed as a Jenny Craig weight-loss counselor for 26 years, according to the unanimous Appellate Division panel opinion, Flanzman v. Jenny Craig, on Wednesday.

Flanzman and her attorneys had cited multiple grounds, arguing to the panel that Flanzman should not be forced into arbitration with Jenny Craig. The company had brought a motion to compel arbitration in the lawsuit.

The panel agreed with Flanzman’s argument that the arbitration agreement the weight-loss counselor had signed in 2011—after some 20 years as a Jenny Craig employee—lacked mutual assent and was therefore invalid as a matter of contract law.