SSA Blog

Separate and apart from the Court’s earlier holding in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011) that businesses could include arbitration provisions with class action waivers in their consumer contracts, the Supreme Court added to their support for arbitration provisions with class action waivers as part of their recent holding in the cases of Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris and National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil, Inc., decided May 21, 2018.

The Third Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals issued its decision in late April in the case of Spade v. Select Comfort Corp. This case arose from class actions pending in New Jersey that were based on the state’s Truth in Consumer Contract, Warranty and Notice Act (otherwise coined the “TCCWNA law”).

The California Supreme Court last week unanimously ruled that a protection plan is not insurance. The decision ended five years of litigation against A-1 Self Storage.

The self storage industry has been a take-all-comers business since its inception. Self Storage operators do not typically run credit checks on their customers before renting a space and require minimum identification.

Although credit reporting has been in use for sixty years, it has not yet been fully applied in the self storage industry, except in limited circumstances where post sale collection deficiencies have been sent to collection agencies who try to post the debt with the credit reporting agencies.

A lot of attention has been generated recently regarding what “late fees” may be charged by self storage operators to their tenants based on state law requirements.

Contracts of all varieties place an obligation on one or both parties to use their “best effort” or “commercially reasonable efforts” or some variation on the efforts theme to accomplish the goals of the contract.

There has been a long-standing debate within the self storage industry about when the first self storage facilities were built. The general census is that the first self storage facilities were built in the southwest in the mid-1960's.

Employers must begin using the revised I-9 form for new hires no later than September 19, 2017. Employer must ensure that every new hire executes an I-9 within the first 3 days of employment and must retain the form for at least three years from the hiring date or one year after the last day of employment, whichever occurs later.

Certainly, the self storage industry has benefited from adding computers and the internet to their business operations over the last twenty years. The ability to store and transmit data about self storage tenants, the ease of managing financial transactions and the use of social media to engage greater marketing have certainly affected how facility operators conduct their business and have enhanced their bottom line profitability.