Agri-Systems, Inc. v. Foster Poultry Farms

A general contractor challenges the superior court’s decision to confirm an arbitration award, contending the award should have been vacated because the arbitrator violated his disclosure obligation. The general contractor argues that the arbitrator was required to disclose his law firm’s representation of a company that owed the general contractor over $3 million. The record demonstrates that (1) another attorney in the arbitrator’s law firm represented the debtor company at the beginning of a bankruptcy proceeding; (2) the debtor company’s interests were adverse to the general contractor’s interests; (3) those adverse interests resulted in litigation between the debtor company and the general contractor; (4) the arbitrator’s law firm had withdrawn from representing the debtor company before the litigation between the debtor company and the general contractor began; and (5) the arbitrator was appointed in the present case a year and a half after his firm’s withdrawal as attorney of record for the debtor company in its bankruptcy proceeding.

Neither the California Arbitration Act (CAA), the ethics standards for contractual arbitration, nor the cases applying those…