Appellate court ruling will make a lot more work for Web designers

E-commerce leaders take note: If you want to force your customers to do anything via your terms and conditions, you need to give the T&C its own checkbox. So help me, that is the edict just handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. The specific ruling involved getting customers of TransUnion to waive their right to sue, but attorneys watching the case point out that it could apply to almost anything. Want customers to sign over their salary direct deposits to you? No problem, as long as it’s in your T&C and, critically, it has its very own checkbox. 

Before we delve into this legally correct but logically bankrupt ruling, some quick background. The current law of the land involving the broader issue of forcing consumers to accept arbitration instead of allowing them to sue in civil court is a case from five years ago called AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, referred to by lawyers simply as Concepcion. In that 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that companies had the right to mandate arbitration simply by mentioning it somewhere in a T&C document, one as long as they liked. 

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