The plaintiff applied through the website of the defendant which assigns house cleaning jobs to workers. Later, she clicked an accept button on a screen that displayed the first few sentences of the independent contractor agreement. It had a mandatory arbitration clause she did not see.
She later sued alleging misclassification as an independent contractor. She argued she did not have sufficient notice of the arbitration clause to be bound by it. She was ordered to arbitrate the case.
Why This Is Important… Massachusetts case law says an online contract is formed when the user has reasonable notice of the terms and has made a reasonable manifestation of assent to those terms. Here, the screen displaying the portion of the Agreement that was plainly visible before she selected Accept made clear that additional text further specifying the terms of the Agreement could be viewed by scrolling. The court said she could not succeed in arguing she was not provided with reasonable notice of the arbitration provision because she chose not to review it despite having had an adequate opportunity to do so. Because the plaintiff had reasonable notice of the agreement and its terms, the 1st Circuit concluded, the arbitration provision was enforceable.
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