Originally from Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation

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This article follows-up on the author’s reporting, which explained why the New York state’s Appellate Division, First Department, was wrong in 2012 when it unanimously upheld a New York lower court’s vacatur of an arbitrator’s sanctions award against Jack J. Grynberg in Matter of Jack J. Grynberg et al., Respondents, v. BP Exploration Operating Co. Ltd. et al., Appellants, 92 A.D.3d 547, 938 N.Y.S.2d 439 (2012) (available at http://bit.ly/2x7FXpj).

The earlier work, a New York Law Journal article by this author, titled “Step Back in Time: Curtailing Arbitrators’ Authority to Award Sanctions,” N.Y.L.J. 7 (Aug. 6, 2012)(available with a subscription at http://bit.ly/2v4U7Wn), examined the vacatur of the arbitrator’s award of sanctions against Grynberg, which is referred to in this article as the “Sanctions Issue.”

This article will explain why the First Department was wrong again in 2015 when it unanimously affirmed a lower court’s decision in the same case, but on a different issue, referred to in this article as the “Signature Bonus Issue”. Matter of Grynberg v. BP Exploration Operating Co. Ltd., 127 A.D.3d 553, 7 N.Y.S.2d 125 (2015).