The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 125 - Brendan Ballou

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.
You're about to listen to a special preview edition of The Grant Williams Podcast, featuring my very special guest, author Brendan Ballou, who is here to talk about his fantastic new book, which has been published, When Companies Run The Courts, How Forced Arbitration Became America's Secret Justice System. It's a fascinating story of the way the justice system in the United States works. It'll leave you scratching your head, it'll leave you stamping your feet, and it'll leave you a lot wiser about how the system works, the problems inherent in it, and how Brendan suggests we might be able to fix it. Every episode of The Grant Williams Podcast, including The End Game, Super Terrific Happy Hour, The Narrative Game, This Week In Doom, Kaos Theory, Shifts Happen and The 100 Year Pivot, is available to Copper and Silver Tier subscribers at my website, grantwilliams.com. Copper Tier subscribers get access to all the podcasts, while members of The Silver Tier get both the podcasts and my monthly newsletter, Things That Make You Go Hmmm. So, if you enjoy what you hear in the show, and you'd like more high-quality content like it, then please make your way over to grantwilliams.com and join our excited community today. And now, on with the show.
Brendan, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while since our first conversation. You teased a new book back then, and I'm delighted that we get the chance to talk about it today. The new book, When Companies Run the Court, How Forced Arbitration Became America's Secret Justice System. You gave us a good teaser for it, and I'm thrilled to have the chance to discuss it. So welcome back.

**Brendan Ballou** (2:07)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Grant Williams** (2:09)
It's a wild book. We live in wild times, and I think particularly growing up in the UK as I did, we always had this idea that the legal system in the US was crazy because in the UK, just the one simple thing of costs being payable by the plaintiff, if they're ruled against, that seemed to do such a great job of stopping a lot of frivolous lawsuits. In the US, obviously, that's not the case. Everyone has to pay their way. But when we get into the book, it's way crazy than I thought it was. So let's start with what it was that led you to write the book, because that will feed in a little bit of your background for the people that don't remember, and we'll take it from there.

**Brendan Ballou** (2:43)
My background was as a lawyer and as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice here in the United States. And I had written this book about private equity and a critique of that business model. And through the work of interviewing people for that, and then just through my work at the Department of Justice and the Antitrust Division doing white-collar crime and so forth, I was talking to a lot of non-lawyers, and I got the sense from them that they felt that the legal system, at least in America, was profoundly stacked against them, that this is a legal system that's really built for the very rich and for big corporations and not for them.
And as a practicing lawyer, I wanted to be able to say to them, actually, by and large, you're right. We do have a system that's stacked against you, but I wanted to explain it in a way that was grounded in facts and focused on one specific issue. And I felt that if I could explain this story through one specific issue, I could help people understand how our legal system has evolved to be so stacked against them, and also how we might get it back.

**Grant Williams** (3:39)
The thing you chose as your device, I guess, is arbitration. And I guess, bizarrely, for a lot of people, me included, you feel like arbitration is a great thing, because the idea is it reduces costs, and we have someone, you have to go to a courtroom, and it will be decided without the crazy kind of legal fees that are common in the United States. But when you unfold your work, that gets dispelled pretty quickly in a very different dynamic appears. So let's talk about that arbitration, how it came to be, and how this kind of insidious rise and its grip on the American legal system is such a problem.