The Southern District of Florida denied a TCPA defendant's (The Cover Bear, LLC) motion to compel arbitration in Boyd v. The Cover Bear, LLC, No. 1:26-cv-20408 (S.D. Fla. Aug. 12, 2026).
Cover Bear wanted the case out of court and into arbitration as a way to evade potential class liability. Problem for them though was the arb clause it pointed to belonged to someone else. . .
That someone else was PolicyWagon, which operates policywagon.com, an online automobile-insurance referral website. The site's business is introductions: it "connects consumers with available automobile insurance deals through its marketing affiliates," the defendant supposedly among them. Bundled into the Terms on PolicyWagon's website is an arbitration clause.
The arb clause's reach is where the motion came apart. It covers disputes arising from use of the site's services, and it says those disputes "shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration between us and you, or between our subsidiaries, affiliates, or agents and you." The defendant was not otherwise named anywhere in the Terms.
Cover Bear's position was that it qualified as a third-party beneficiary and could enforce the arb clause regardless.
The Court disagreed, finding the agreement was "explicitly limited" to disputes between the plaintiff and the site, and between the plaintiff and the site's subsidiaries, affiliates, or agents. The defendant "present[ed] no evidence" that it was any of those three things in addition to being a marketing partner. And while the Terms did tell consumers that marketing partners might text them, the Court held that "the arbitration agreement does not extend its applicability to marketing partners." Permission to send a message and permission to invoke a forum clause were shelved separately.
What makes the order notable is that it is the third of its kind recently. In December, Lucas v. Coastal Advantage Mktg. LLC, No. 25-60450-CIV, 2025 WL 3759231 (S.D. Fla. Dec. 30, 2025), rejected the same maneuver, holding that sweeping "relate to or arise from" language "is only broad as to the arbitrable subjects that the signatories to the arbitration agreement have agreed to arbitrate, not as to the identity of the parties subject to the arbitration clause." In March, Muhammad v. Rates Vip, LLC, No. 25-CV-11862, 2026 WL 735253 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 16, 2026), rejected it again on what this Court described as "a similar set of facts," adding that the "fact that 'marketing partners' receive certain incidental benefits under the Terms and Conditions, like the right to send consumers text messages, does not make them a third-party beneficiary of the arbitration clause under the law — especially when they are explicitly excluded from the list of those to whom such benefit applies."
This is a good run for the people on the receiving end of spam texts and calls. Forced arbitration has become a default off-ramp in American consumer litigation, a way to move disputes out of class posture and into individual arbitration. Watching courts decline to extend that off ramp to defendants that aren't even parties to the terms they seek to enforce is an encouraging development.
