The encyclopedia · Legal & Compliance · Legal decision · 2019–2020
DoorDash wrote a clause banning class actions — then 6,250 workers filed alone
DoorDash's contract forced couriers into individual arbitration — when 6,250 filed exactly that way, DoorDash refused to pay the fees its own clause required.
DoorDash · 2020-02-10
What happened
DoorDash's courier contract carried a mandatory arbitration clause that waived class or collective actions — any dispute had to go through individual, AAA-administered arbitration. The law firm Keller Lenkner took that clause at its word: in August and September 2019 it filed individual AAA arbitration demands for 6,250 couriers at once, each one a separate case under the process DoorDash itself had written into the contract.
Under AAA's commercial rules each individual filing cost $300, paid by the courier, and DoorDash owed roughly $1,900 per case to proceed — close to $12 million total. Couriers had already paid over $1.2 million in filing fees when AAA set deadlines for DoorDash's share. DoorDash's lawyers refused to pay, calling the sum an obligation it disputed, and AAA administratively closed all 6,250 files for nonpayment.
Keller Lenkner asked the federal court to compel DoorDash into the arbitration it had demanded of its own couriers. On 10 February 2020, in Abernathy v. DoorDash (N.D. Cal., No. 3:19-cv-07545), Judge William Alsup granted the motion for 5,010 of the petitioners, denied DoorDash's request to stay the order, and wrote that "DoorDash's hypocrisy will not be blessed, at least by this order." The order noted DoorDash had already begun steering new couriers toward a different arbitration provider.
Why it happened
- A clause written to keep a company out of one large, cheap class action becomes a bill for thousands of small, expensive individual cases the moment claimants actually use it as written.
- Refusing to pay the arbitration fees its own contract required asked a federal judge to enforce the exact process DoorDash had insisted couriers use instead of court.
- Switching new couriers to a different arbitration provider after the fact showed the fix was to change future contracts, not to honor the one 6,250 people had already signed.
The lesson
Mandatory individual arbitration only saves money if nobody files it at scale — a law firm can file one case per claimant and hand the class action's cost back one filing fee at a time.
Aftermath
The ruling became a reference point for later mass-arbitration campaigns against other companies with similar clauses, including gig-economy peers and, later, Live Nation/Ticketmaster. DoorDash had already moved new courier agreements to a different arbitration administrator before the order was issued, and mass-filed arbitration became a standard tactic for plaintiffs' firms confronting class-action waivers.
Sources
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