Riot Games is reportedly looking for individual arbitration in the class-action lawsuit by former employees accusing the company of gender discrimination and sexual harassment. The complaints were raised back in 2018 when 28 Riot employees accused the company of engaging in gender discrimination.
A year after the accusations were raised, Riot Games started seeking opportunities to move the case to arbitration. They claimed that the plaintiffs had signed arbitration clauses at the time of their hiring.
“If Riot succeeds, it will pay a private judge huge amounts of money to decide the fate of the women’s claims. And all that will happen in secret, with Riot’s discriminatory conduct hidden from the public,” says Genie Harrison, attorney of the plaintiff.
According to a report from GamesIndustry.biz, Riot claimed that moving the case to arbitration would enable the studio to “reach a fair and speedy resolution to these cases.” The company claimed further that they were “willing to engage in constructive dialogue to bring these matters to resolution as quickly as possible — so long as the resolution is grounded in the facts of these cases.”
On January 25th, the court agreed to allow the lawsuit to move to arbitration, following which Riot issued a statement saying, “This ruling will allow us to reach a fair and speedy resolution to these cases, some of which have already been pending for more than two years.
We have always been, and will continue to be, willing to engage in constructive dialogue to bring these matters to resolution as quickly as possible — so long as the resolution is grounded in the facts of these cases.”