The Court Just Made Your Claimant Roster a Proof Problem. That Changes Your Completion Math.

Here is a question most plaintiff firms skip when they model a mass arb matter: how many of the claimants on your roster can actually prove they agreed to the arbitration clause you are filing under?

Until recently, that question didn't matter much. A defendant would produce a spreadsheet of digital sign-ups, the court would nod, and the clause applied to everyone on the list. The Seventh Circuit changed that calculus in Wallrich v. Samsung, and the ripple effects are starting to show up in completion economics in ways that most firms haven't modeled.

What Wallrich Actually Said

The short version: bulk spreadsheets of digital sign-ups are no longer enough to prove that a consumer agreed to an arbitration clause. The Seventh Circuit now requires admissible, individualized proof of a contract before a company can force a claimant into arbitration.

That sounds like a plaintiff win, and in one sense it is. Defendants can no longer wave a database export and compel arbitration for thousands of people at once.

But here is the part nobody is talking about on the plaintiff side: the same evidentiary standard applies in reverse. If you are filing mass arbitration demands on behalf of 5,000 claimants, the defendant's counsel is now incentivized to challenge assent on a claimant-by-claimant basis. Not to win on the merits. To shrink your roster.

Your Roster Is Not Your Completion Pool

Most firms model completion like this: we have 5,000 signed claimants, the release threshold is 85%, so we need 4,250 to complete. Then they build outreach cadences around hitting that 4,250 number.

After Wallrich, the math has a new variable. Some percentage of your roster may have assent problems that the defendant will surface during the process. Maybe the claimant signed up through a flow where the arbitration clause was buried three clicks deep. Maybe the ToS version at sign-up was different from the current one. Maybe the claimant used a shared device and the defendant argues there is no proof the named individual actually clicked "agree."

Each claimant the defendant successfully challenges on assent grounds shrinks your eligible pool. Your threshold doesn't move, but the denominator does. If you started at 5,000 and lose 400 to assent challenges, you now need 4,250 completions out of 4,600 eligible claimants. That is a 92.4% completion rate instead of 85%.

That difference is enormous. It is the difference between a completion campaign that has breathing room and one that has to be nearly perfect.

The Defense Playbook Is Already Adapting

Defense counsel reads the same opinions we do. The Ninth Circuit's Heckman v. Live Nation decision already constrained batching. Now Wallrich gives defendants a new tool: challenge assent at the individual level to reduce the plaintiff's effective claimant count without ever touching the merits.

Think about the incentive structure. A defendant facing 5,000 demands doesn't need to beat all 5,000. They need to knock enough claimants off the roster that the plaintiff firm can't hit its release threshold economically. If your per-claimant completion cost is $12 and you planned for 5,000 claimants, your budget is $60,000. If 500 claimants get challenged and 300 fall off, your completion cost per remaining claimant just went up, because your fixed outreach infrastructure is now spread across fewer people who can actually convert.

This is not hypothetical. Practitioners are already flagging that companies are rewriting ToS flows specifically to create cleaner assent records going forward, which means the gap between "old" claimants (whose assent records are messy) and "new" claimants (whose records are airtight) is going to widen.

The Fix Is Upstream, Not Downstream

The firms that will navigate this well are the ones that audit assent evidence before they file, not after the defendant raises it. That means three things:

1. Screen for assent quality at intake. When you acquire a claimant, capture the version of the ToS they agreed to, the date, and the mechanism (clickwrap, browsewrap, sign-in-wrap). If you cannot reconstruct the assent chain for a specific claimant, flag that claimant as at-risk before you file.
2. Model completion against a risk-adjusted roster. If you think 8% of your claimants have weak assent records, model your completion target against 92% of your roster, not 100%. That changes your outreach budget, your timeline, and your threshold math.
3. Build the evidence chain into your completion stack. Your claims administrator should be capturing and storing assent documentation as part of the claimant record, not as an afterthought. When a defendant challenges assent for claimant #3,847, you need the answer in minutes, not weeks.

Why This Is a Technology Problem, Not Just a Legal One

Legacy claims administrators were not built for this. They were built to send notices and collect responses. The idea that you would need to store, retrieve, and defend individualized assent evidence for thousands of claimants on demand is a data architecture problem, and most admin platforms handle it with manual workarounds or not at all.

This is one of the reasons we built GroupSettle around native document signing as the foundation of the stack, not as a bolt-on. Every claimant interaction, from the initial sign-up through every outreach touch, lives in one system with a complete audit trail. When a defendant challenges assent for a specific claimant, the evidence is already structured and retrievable. You are not asking a vendor to pull records from three different platforms and hoping the timestamps line up.

I'm biased. I built the thing. But the math doesn't care who built it. What matters is whether your completion model accounts for the fact that your roster and your eligible pool are no longer the same number.

The Takeaway

Wallrich changed the game for defendants, but the real impact is on plaintiff-side completion economics. Every claimant on your roster is now carrying an implicit assent risk score that affects whether they can convert. Firms that model completion without accounting for that risk are building campaigns on a number that isn't real.

Audit your assent evidence before you file. Model your threshold against a risk-adjusted pool. And make sure your admin stack can defend individual claimant records on demand, because defendants are going to start asking.