Defendant Admitted It Did Not Enter Into Contract With Student To Provide Him With Debt Relief Services
Student loan debt is an area of our economy ripe to generate cases on arbitration and class action. See for example my April 12, 2013 post about Kilgore v. Keybank, No. 09-16703 (9th Cir. April 11, 2013), a case in which students of a failed helicopter flight-training school, in which the 9th Circuit, sitting en banc, found that the class action waiver was not unconscionable.
Rajagopalan v. NoteWorld, LLC, No. 12-35205 (9th Cir. May 20, 2013) (per curiam) (for publication), is yet another student loan debt case.
After losing his job, Plaintiff Rajagopalan, an electrical engineer who accumulated $15,000 in student debt, sought a professional loan work out solution by contacting a company on the Internet. He signed a contract that contained an arbitration clause. After some months passed, Plaintiff cancelled his subscription, only to find out that the company responsible for the payment processing had had withdrawn $8,290.15 from his account, and he had received no debt relief.
NoteWorld, which was responsible for payment processing, was not a signatory to the contract. Its in-house counsel explained that NoteWorld was an “independent third-party and does not act as an agent for the [debt relief service provider], nor does it take on any of the contractual obligations of the DRSP.”
Plaintiff filed a lawsuit against NoteWorld, and NoteWorld sought to take advantage of the arbitration provision in the contract between Plaintiff and the debt relief company. The district court denied NoteWorld’s motion to compel arbitration.
Under Washington state law, “both contracting parties must intend that a third party beneficiary contract be created.” Here, evidence was lacking that Plaintiff intended to designate NoteWorld as a third-party beneficiary, or that NoteWorld assumed any duties or obligations under the contract.
In order to successfully invoke equitable estoppel, it was essential “that the subject matter of the dispute was intertwined with the contract providing for arbitration.” Such was not the case here, because Plaintiff’s claims against NoteWorld were statutory claims separate from the contract itself.
Affirmed.
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