About The Loree Law Firm

The Loree Law Firm focuses its practice on helping small businesses, businesspersons, and professionals prevent, handle, manage, and resolve arbitration-related disputes, including by representing them in arbitrations, mediations, and arbitration-related litigation falling under the Federal Arbitration Act, state arbitration law, or both. It represents business organizations and persons acting in their individual or representative capacities, and frequently serves as co-counsel, local counsel, or legal adviser to other domestic and international law firms requiring assistance or support.

The Loree Law Firm was formerly Loree & Loree, a law partnership Philip J. Loree Jr. formed in 2008 with Philip J. Loree Sr., who retired from the practice of law in 2020. Philip J. Loree Jr. has continued the practice as The Loree Law Firm.

Why an Arbitration Focus?

If you’re reading this, it is probably because you are a business, businessperson, or professional that: (a) is seeking legal representation in a current or contemplated arbitration or arbitration-related litigation; (b) has or anticipates having problems related to arbitration or arbitration-related litigation, whether or not you are already represented by counsel; or (c) is considering using arbitration but is seeking advice on how to avoid problems with it. If so, you’ve come to the right place.

The Loree Law Firm focuses its practice on arbitration and arbitration-related litigation because the nature of arbitration and arbitration law poses very serious challenges to small businesses, businesspersons, and professionals who have agreed, or allegedly agreed, to arbitrate disputes with their business counterparts or others. These clients need affordable counsel with extensive arbitration and arbitration-related skill and experience, partner-level large firm experience, and an ability to litigate and arbitrate effectively against businesses represented by large firms. The Loree Law Firm serves these needs.

Small Business Arbitration Challenges

Over the last few decades or so, arbitration has become a less attractive alternative to court litigation than it was intended to be, could be, and once was. Arbitration has long been touted as less expensive than litigation, but arbitration-administrator and arbitrator fees are often very high, sometimes high enough to discourage or prevent small businesses from pursuing or defending claims that they could have pursued or defended in court had they not agreed to arbitrate. These high fees can considerably raise the stakes of a challenge to the enforceability of an arbitration agreement and can create or exacerbate other arbitration-related problems.

Repeat Players versus Outsiders

Arbitration frequently pits repeat players—businesses which frequently use an arbitration provider’s services—against outsiders—businesses or individuals who find themselves in arbitrations administered by an arbitration provider that they do not ordinarily use.

Repeat players generate more revenue for arbitration providers and their stable of arbitrators over time than do outsiders. In theory that should not matter because arbitration providers and their arbitrators at least ostensibly offer neutral dispute resolution services and may do so with the best of intentions.

But economic realities suggest an actual or potential conflict of interest—that is, a conflict between the provider’s and arbitrator’s interest in neutrality and their interest in facilitating an arbitration outcome that will not dissuade the repeat player from continuing to use the provider’s services regularly.

Businesses, particularly smaller business that are not arbitration provider repeat players, may find themselves in a challenging environment. They are outsiders in an arbitration system that may be administered by an organization, and presided over by one or more arbitrators, which may consciously or unconsciously be predisposed, to at least some degree, to prefer an outcome favorable to the repeat player and adverse to the outsider.

Businesses are also challenged by arbitration repeat players in a different way. Repeat players tend to be larger businesses having more economic resources than smaller, outsider businesses. They can hire larger law firms, which may not only staff the case with more lawyers than a small business can afford to hire, but staff it with lawyers having more arbitration and arbitration-law expertise and experience than the small business’ attorney may have.

Arbitration’s Unfulfilled Promises

Another challenge businesses face is that arbitration does not always deliver on its promises. Arbitration is supposed to be a desirable, speedy, and cost-efficient substitute for litigation. To achieve these benefits parties who agree to arbitrate are presumed to have traded off the advantages that litigation has to offer, including intensive procedural protections, strict application of the rules of law and evidence, broader subpoena powers, pristine decision-maker neutrality, joinder and impleader powers, coercive power over attorneys, self-executing contempt power over persons within the court’s personal jurisdiction irrespective of their status as parties, appellate review, and so on.

But unfortunately, the trade off one makes by agreeing to arbitration, and forgoing litigation, does not always yield expected benefits. For any number of reasons, arbitration’s promises frequently are unfulfilled, and sometimes, quite perversely, the decision to opt out of court litigation can, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, greatly increase dispute resolution risk for small businesses, businesspersons, and professionals.

Challenges Caused by the Differences Between Arbitration and Litigation

Arbitration is different from litigation. Its procedures are less formal, arbitrators are not expected necessarily to follow rules of law or evidence strictly, they have enormous leeway to interpret the parties’ agreement and the law, they can commit errors of law or fact for which an award challenger cannot obtain judicial recourse, and their decisions cannot be vacated, modified, or corrected, save for under narrow circumstances and subject to very deferential judicial review only.

These differences and others require attorneys representing clients in arbitration to present their cases in a manner that is most likely to persuade the arbitrator or arbitration panel to rule in their client’s favor; to take advantage of those differences to the extent they may increase the chances of an outcome favorable to the client; and to mitigate, to the extent reasonably possible, the adverse effect those differences may have on the client’s case. At the same time the attorney representing the client must be sure to preserve, by proper objections, clarification and explanation, the arbitration record should the client later challenge the award or defend a challenge.

Challenges Posed by Arbitration Law and Arbitration-Related Litigation

The nature of arbitration-law poses still more challenges with which businesses (including repeat players) must grapple. Arbitration law authorizes courts to provide only very limited relief to parties who claim to be the victims of arbitration-agreement violations, whether committed by arbitrators or by an adverse party.

Arbitration law doctrines, rules, and procedures remain somewhat arcane even though arbitration disputes and arbitration-related litigation are common. Consequently, outcomes and rationales are often counterintuitive, unless the lawyer has thorough knowledge of and experience with arbitration law.

Arbitration law’s procedural rules are fraught with traps for the wary, which are, among other things, designed to encourage early forfeiture of defenses that might otherwise be raised in Federal Arbitration Act litigation. If your attorney does not know the rules well or does not follow them, then your interests may be compromised.

Businesses and others facing arbitration problems require skilled and experienced representation to protect their interests. The Loree Law Firm offers the kind of affordable representation small and medium-sized businesses, businesspersons, and professionals require to protect their dispute-resolution interests.

The Loree Law Firm’s Principal: Philip J. Loree Jr.

Philip J. Loree Jr., principal of The Loree Law Firm, has 30 years of experience representing clients in complex disputes before arbitration panels and federal and state trial and appellate courts, particularly in the arbitration-law, reinsurance, insurance, and other commercial or business arbitration and litigation fields. Before forming Loree & Loree in 2008, Loree Jr. practiced for nearly 17 years with one of the then leading reinsurance practice groups in the United States and was a litigation partner in two prominent New York City law firms. You can read more about Philip J. Loree Jr. here.

Loree Law Firm Arbitration and Arbitration Law Resources

You can learn more about arbitration law in The Arbitration Law Forum (formerly, the Loree Reinsurance and Arbitration Law Forum), which features hundreds of articles on the subject, and by viewing the video interviews the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (“CPR”) conducted of Loree & Loree partner Philip J. Loree Jr. and former trial judge and fellow arbitration-law practitioner Richard D. Faulkner, Esq., which can be accessed here. Read more about The Loree Law Firm’s Arbitration Law, Practice & Procedure and B-2-B Arbitration and Litigation practices here and here.

Can we Help You? The Loree Law Firm’s Initial Strategy Discussion Offer

If you’ve been searching the net looking for attorneys or law firms, you’ve probably seen countless so-called “free consultation” offers. And you’re probably wondering what they really mean, if anything.

Here’s what The Loree Law Firm offers instead to businesses and individuals who contact us about an arbitration or arbitration-law problem: a free Initial Strategy Discussion, along with a complimentary Initial Fact and Issue Summary.

You contact us by email or telephone to briefly describe for us your arbitration law matter or problem.

We’ll ask you a few questions and, if all is in order from the standpoint of potential conflicts of interest, we’ll make arrangements to have a 20-30 minute or so strategy telephone conference with you to discuss your matter, perhaps on video-conference if you like. We may ask you to send us, prior to the conference, a few, specific key documents relating to your matter.

At the conference we’ll ask you more questions about the facts, discuss the matter with you, and give you our preliminary thoughts on the principal issues raised as well as on steps you might decide to take in an effort to resolve the problem.

But there’s a takeaway, too: an Initial Fact and Issue Summary.

After the conference we’ll prepare for you a brief, written summary of the key facts you’ve conveyed to us, our preliminary identification of the principal issues raised by those facts, and a list of steps you might take in an effort to resolve the problem. This is your complimentary Initial Fact and Issue Summary.

After you review the summary you can decide whether you want to engage The Loree Law Firm to handle your matter going forward. Whether you do or you do not, you will not be charged for the strategy discussion, the summary, or the work that led up to that discussion and summary.

If you have an arbitration law matter on which you believe you may need advice and counsel, then email us at PJL1@LoreeLawFirm.com or call (516) 941-6094 or (516) 627-1720, and we’ll get going right away on your Initial Strategy Discussion and Fact and Issue Summary.

We look forward to hearing from you!