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Amway/Quixtar/Alticor
Appeal |
Site visitors can read the arguments to Amway/Quixtar/Alticor's 8th Circuit Court's appeal to Judge Dorr's ruling that slammed Quixtar's arbitration agreement. Two of Alticor's/Quixtar's briefs to case 05-3686 are available on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals website. You can search for them under case number 05-3686. Stewart's and Hart's reply are not on the website. APPELLANT Brief Filed: 12/21/2005 Alternate location Alticor's briefAPPELLEE Brief Filed: 02/06/2006 (the Appellee brief is not available)(can somebody send it to me?) REPLY Brief Filed: 03/10/2006 Alternate location Alticor's reply brief
Quotes from the documents: "Tools businesses also benefit economically from their principals’agreements with Amway. For example, the requirement that distributors train and motivate their downlines enables tools companies like plaintiffs to earn significant revenue, in some cases millions of dollars, by selling motivational products through the line of sponsorship of their principals’ Amway distributorships" "Amway has produced training materials for prospective arbitrators and has conducted informational sessions to familiarize them with the Amway business" 'Plaintiffs acknowledge that the Amway Sales and Marketing Plan encourages distributors to purchase tools and to attend functions (Apdx 15-16). By their own characterization, plaintiffs are "related and supportive of the Amway business" and were in fact "birthed" by Amway by mandatory training and motivation requirements' "The Court should be aware that the Amway arbitrator-selection procedures have been amended since the district court’s ruling, and now permit parties to select an arbitrator who has not received Amway orientation and training." "It seems fair to surmise that plaintiffs don’t like arbitration. They obviously feel that they can hoodwink an unsophisticated group of home-town jurors with their Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theory, whereas they would have no chance of success before a panel of experienced lawyers and ex-judges who actually understand Amway’s unique and complex business." "Plaintiffs prefer not to discuss the millions of dollars they have earned as a direct result of their membership in the Amway organization. They do not – and cannot — take issue with our statement that it is the Amway Rules of Conduct that make their success possible by permitting them to sell BSMs to their principals’ Amway distributorships’ line of sponsorship, while preventing others from soliciting BSM sales from their principals’ downlines." "Plaintiffs’ laundry-list of hurdles erected to abrogate the Amway arbitration agreement may well have been taken from some form book published by the antiarbitration bar. These same tired theories have been raised and consistently rejected in an increasing number of cases in recent years. In almost all of those instances, though, it has been the "little guy" claiming oppression at the hands of a well-funded "big guy." While these legally baseless efforts may have some emotional appeal in those circumstances, they are utterly unpersuasive when advanced by sophisticated multimillionaires like plaintiffs." "Amway Corporation changed its name to Alticor, Inc. on October 23, 2000, and all Amway distributor contracts were then transferred to Quixtar" The briefs also make mention of some cases that got routed to arbitration
that I did not know about before. |
