Keeping records on when and how your employees sign their arbitration agreements could be helpful if there's ever a dispute over them

I just blogged about an arbitration case, and here's another one out of California, Garcia v. Tropicale Foods, Inc., E069024. In the last case I blogged about, arbitration was compelled, but in this one, the court reaches a different conclusion, finding that the employer Tropicale failed to prove that Garcia signed the arbitration agreement. The case serves as a lesson to employers hoping to enforce arbitration agreements against their employees: They need to be able to offer information about the circumstances of the employee signing the agreement. Garcia maintained that she never signed the agreement, and in response Tropicale offered a declaration of an employee saying that Garcia did sign the agreement. But that bare declaration wasn't enough, according to the court. It did not offer any sense of the timing or circumstances of the signature, which were important in this case, since the date on the agreement looked like September 2015, but Garcia had been terminated in August 2015. Therefore, the court did not compel arbitration.