In 2022, a dispute between the Washington Commanders and the National Football League was heard in arbitration at JAMS. The proceeding, like most commercial arbitration, is confidential — the firm's published record identifies it by caption and case number, Washington Commanders v. National Football League, JAMS Case No. 1410009206 (2022), and the firm does not discuss the matter beyond that record.
What can be said is structural. When a franchise and its league end up adverse, the evidence that matters lives where modern organizational evidence always lives — email systems, mobile devices, messaging platforms, shared drives — and the parties on both sides are sophisticated enough to contest every step of how that evidence is preserved, collected, searched, and produced.
Why it was difficult
Arbitration strips away the scaffolding that federal-court discovery takes for granted. There is no Rule 26(f) conference mandated by rule, no body of ESI case law binding the tribunal, no magistrate judge with a standing order. The arbitrator sets the scope of discovery, and the parties argue for their version of it. In that vacuum, questions that a district court would resolve by citing precedent — what preservation was required, whether a collection was adequate, whether a production methodology was defensible — get resolved instead on the strength of expert evidence.
That puts unusual weight on the expert. The tribunal's understanding of what is technically reasonable is, to a significant degree, what the experts persuade it is reasonable.
The firm's role
A Law & Forensics principal, Daniel B. Garrie, served as an eDiscovery expert in the arbitration. The firm's published record cites the engagement as: Washington Commanders v. National Football League, JAMS Case No. 1410009206 (2022) — one of the named matters in the firm's record of court and arbitral engagements.
The firm publishes the engagement and its citation; matter details remain confidential to the arbitration.
Evidence and method
The firm's method in eDiscovery expert engagements does not change because the forum does. Opinions about preservation, collection, search, and production start from the systems involved — what they store, what they log, what a given methodology can and cannot honestly claim to have covered — and are written with their basis and limits stated. If anything, arbitration raises the bar for that discipline: with no appellate safety net and no precedent to lean on, an opinion has to be persuasive on its own engineering.
Impact
The arbitration's outcome is not public, and the firm does not characterize it. The engagement's significance for a prospective client is what the record itself shows: when a professional sports franchise and its league were adverse in a confidential, high-stakes forum, the eDiscovery expertise brought into the room was the firm's.
The expert dimension
Arbitral expert evidence faces a compressed and unforgiving form of scrutiny. There is no Daubert gatekeeper to survive — instead, everything is tested live: cross-examination before the arbitrator, rebuttal by the opposing side's expert, and a tribunal free to discount any opinion it finds thin. And because review of arbitral awards under the Federal Arbitration Act is deliberately narrow, the evidentiary record made at the hearing is effectively final. Expert work in that setting has one chance to hold up, which is how the firm's testifying-expert work is built in every forum.
Related capabilities
eDiscovery Services · Expert Witness Services · Court & Arbitral Appointments · Daniel B. Garrie
