How a Debt Buyer's Own Arbitration Clause Ended Its Wisconsin Lawsuit Against Me

On April 10, 2026, a court commissioner in Eau Claire County, Wisconsin entered an order dismissing a lawsuit that an Atlanta-based debt buyer, Plaza Services LLC, had filed against me nine months earlier. The hearing the day before, at which the dismissal was decided, lasted eight minutes. I had represented myself throughout. The dismissal was without prejudice, which means Plaza can refile if the statute of limitations allows. It paid no judgment, recovered no money, and obtained no merits ruling. But the lawsuit it filed, on the schedule it chose, in the forum it selected, ended on terms it did not choose.

The mechanism is worth describing precisely, because it turns on a piece of consumer-arbitration infrastructure that most defendants in these cases never encounter. Plaza's complaint attached, as an exhibit, the original loan agreement: a Wisconsin Consumer Installment Loan Agreement between me and NC Financial Solutions of Wisconsin, LLC, a Chicago-based online lender doing business as NetCredit. The agreement contained an arbitration provision naming the American Arbitration Association and JAMS as alternative administrators, with the choice of administrator reserved to the consumer. I moved to compel arbitration and stay the court proceedings. Plaza did not oppose. The court granted the motion. I selected AAA and filed a demand for arbitration. AAA declined to administer the case.

AAA's refusal was not a fee dispute. It was a registry problem. Under AAA's Consumer Arbitration Rules and the Consumer Due Process Protocol that governs them, businesses that wish to have consumer disputes administered by AAA must first register their arbitration clauses on a public document called the Consumer Clause Registry. The Registry exists to certify that a business's clause complies with AAA's minimum due-process standards for consumer arbitration — standards developed in 1998 in response to documented abuses of consumer arbitration by repeat-player corporate defendants. Plaza Services LLC was not on the Registry. So when my demand for arbitration arrived, AAA looked, did not find Plaza, and refused to open the case.

I returned to the Eau Claire County court and moved to dismiss on the ground that the arbitration Plaza had agreed to was unavailable through Plaza's own non-compliance with the forum it had inherited by assignment. Plaza's counsel opposed in writing in December 2025, asserting that Plaza was now in good standing with AAA. They attached no AAA correspondence. At the April 9 hearing four months later, Plaza's counsel argued that AAA had made a mistake and that Plaza was registered. She produced no documentation in support. The hearing lasted eight minutes. Commissioner Johnson dismissed the case.

What follows is a procedural account of how those events unfolded, with the filings, the dates, and the dollar amounts. It is also an account of what was specific to my case and would not transfer to most others. The arbitration clause in my loan agreement happened to name AAA as one of two administrator options; many consumer-credit clauses do not. The case was filed in small claims court before a court commissioner, which is a venue with its own procedural texture. And I had the time and the willingness to file motions and follow them through nine months of administrative back-and-forth. Most defendants in these cases do not respond at all.

This is not a story about defeating a debt buyer. It is a story about what happens when a defendant uses the procedural infrastructure that a debt buyer's own contract requires, and what that infrastructure reveals about the economic model these lawsuits depend on.

Plaza Services LLC filed the complaint in Eau Claire County Circuit Court on July 28, 2025, under the small-claims procedure governed by Chapter 799 of the Wisconsin statutes. The filing fee was $131.50. The case was assigned case number 2025SC000885 and routed to the small-claims docket, which in Eau Claire County is administered by a court commissioner rather than a circuit-court judge. The summons and complaint were mailed to me by the court the following day.

I did not retain the body of the complaint. What I retained, and what made the rest of the case possible, was the exhibit attached to it: the original Wisconsin Consumer Installment Loan Agreement that NC Financial Solutions of Wisconsin, LLC, doing business as NetCredit, had executed with me on August 5, 2019. Plaza was suing as assignee. It alleged, in the standard form of these complaints, that NetCredit had assigned its rights under the loan to Plaza; that I had defaulted on the loan; and that Plaza was entitled to the unpaid balance. The complaint was represented by Gurstel Law Firm, P.C., a regional consumer-collection litigation firm with offices in nine states, including Wisconsin. The attorney of record was Chad F. Kowalewski.

The structure of the complaint — assignee-creditor, attached loan agreement, generic chain-of-title allegation, standard demand for the unpaid balance — is unremarkable. It is the structure of tens of thousands of debt-buyer complaints filed each year in state courts across the country. What was unusual, in retrospect, was not what Plaza filed. It was what Plaza had failed to do before filing it.

Plaza was not registered on the AAA Consumer Clause Registry. The arbitration provision in the NetCredit loan agreement — the very exhibit Plaza had attached to its own complaint — required arbitration to be administered by AAA or JAMS, at the consumer's election. By assigning itself NetCredit's contract rights, Plaza had also assigned itself NetCredit's contractual forum obligations. And it had not satisfied the threshold compliance requirement that one of those two forums imposes on businesses that want it to administer their consumer disputes.

The complaint, in other words, was filed against a backdrop of unfulfilled procedural obligations. Nothing in the complaint itself signaled this. It would not have been apparent to most defendants. It was not apparent to me when the complaint arrived in my mailbox in late July 2025. I had to file an Answer first, then a Motion to Compel Arbitration, then a Demand for Arbitration with AAA, before the missing piece became visible — and even then, it became visible only because AAA itself surfaced it.

The Wisconsin Consumer Installment Loan Agreement that Plaza attached to its complaint was, in the technical sense, a standard online-lender document. It was governed by Section 138.09 of the Wisconsin statutes, which licenses Wisconsin non-bank consumer lenders and regulates the structure, fees, and disclosures of their loans. The Wisconsin statute does not cap APRs other than for unconscionability; the contract's 36 percent reference appeared in a "Covered Borrowers Savings Clause" applying the federal Military Lending Act, not in any Wisconsin rate cap. The document was structured as a series of disclosures and additional terms, with the Federal Truth in Lending Act disclosures at the top and a section labeled "MISCELLANEOUS" near the end. The arbitration provision appeared after the miscellaneous section, under a heading in bold capitals: ARBITRATION PROVISION.

The provision was long — about fifteen hundred words — and it did most of what arbitration provisions in consumer-credit contracts typically do. It defined "Claim" with what it called "the broadest possible meaning." It included a class-action waiver. It contained an opt-out procedure requiring the borrower to mail a notice to NetCredit's general counsel within sixty days of signing the loan agreement. It carved out small-claims-court matters from the arbitration requirement, stating that the provision did not apply to "any individual action brought by you in small claims court or your state's equivalent court, unless such action is transferred, removed, or appealed to a different court."

Two features of the provision mattered for what followed.

The first was the choice of administrator. The provision stated: "Regardless of who demands arbitration, you shall have the right to select either of the following arbitration organizations to administer the arbitration: the American Arbitration Association ... or JAMS." The right to choose was assigned to the consumer — to me — regardless of which party invoked arbitration. This is not a universal feature of consumer-arbitration clauses. Many clauses name only one administrator. Some name JAMS only. A consumer facing a clause with no AAA option, or with a one-administrator designation that the business has remained compliant with, cannot reproduce what happened in my case.

The second was the governing-law designation. The provision stated that it was "made pursuant to a transaction involving interstate commerce and shall be governed by the Federal Arbitration Act ... and not by any state arbitration law." The FAA designation is common in consumer-credit clauses — it's the standard formulation, calibrated to maximize the clause's enforceability under the Supreme Court's arbitration jurisprudence. The designation matters here only because it means the underlying source of authority for compelling arbitration in this case was federal, not Wisconsin's arbitration statute. The court compelled arbitration anyway; the issue was never contested.

The small-claims carve-out is worth a second look, because it could have foreclosed the entire procedural path. The clause exempted "any individual action brought by you in small claims court" from the arbitration requirement. Plaza, however, was the plaintiff — not me — and Plaza had brought the action in small claims court. The carve-out applied to the consumer's right to avoid arbitration in small-claims actions the consumer chose to bring. It did not apply to debt-buyer actions filed against the consumer. The arbitration provision applied in full to Plaza's complaint. I could compel.

A reader following the procedural logic at this point sees the entire structure of what happened next. Plaza's contract — assigned to it by NetCredit — required arbitration. The arbitration required administration by AAA or JAMS, at my election. To have AAA administer, the business with the contract had to be on AAA's Consumer Clause Registry. Plaza was not. The contract, in other words, was self-defeating: it bound Plaza to a forum Plaza had not satisfied the prerequisites to use.

I filed an Answer to Plaza's complaint on August 4, 2025, eight days after the court mailed me the summons and complaint. The Answer was a short written denial. I did not preserve in it any extensive affirmative-defense theory; what I needed it to do was deny the allegations and keep the case alive long enough to file the motion that would actually do the work.

The reason this matters — and the reason it would matter in most states, not just in Wisconsin — is that Wisconsin Statute § 802.02(1m) requires affirmative defenses to be set forth in a responsive pleading. The statute enumerates a list of such defenses, and the third item on the list is "arbitration and award." A defendant who does not preserve the right to compel arbitration in a timely responsive pleading risks waiving it. The Wisconsin Supreme Court reinforced this rule in 2019 in Maple Grove Country Club v. Maple Grove Estates Sanitary District, holding that affirmative defenses outside the limited list that may be raised by motion under § 802.06(2)(a) must be raised in a responsive pleading. Arbitration falls on the § 802.02(1m) list of affirmative defenses, not on the § 802.06(2)(a) motion-eligible list.

The practical effect, in the context of a debt-buyer lawsuit, is procedural sequencing. A defendant who is served with a complaint and immediately files a motion to compel arbitration — skipping the Answer — risks an argument from the plaintiff that arbitration has been waived. A defendant who never files anything at all loses by default. The narrow path is to answer first, then move. In Wisconsin small claims practice, the response window is short — a defendant must appear at the return date, which is typically set six to eight weeks after the complaint is filed — and most pro se defendants who respond at all do so by appearing at the return date without first filing a written answer. I filed a written Answer eight days after service, well before the return date of August 26, 2025. Eight days happened to be convenient for me. Earlier would have been better. Most defendants who respond at the return date but have not filed a prior Answer are functionally fine in Wisconsin small claims practice, because the return date itself is treated as the appearance — but they have a thinner record to work with later.

The Answer does not appear to have alarmed Plaza or its counsel. Gurstel Law Firm did nothing in response. The case sat for three weeks until the return date in late August.

The return date for Plaza's case was August 26, 2025. Both parties appeared via Zoom. Plaza was represented at the hearing by Selena Bravo, an associate at Gurstel Law Firm appearing for Chad Kowalewski. I appeared by video. The court commissioner referred the case to mediation. Mediation did not produce a settlement. The case was marked contested, and a hearing was scheduled for October 30, 2025.

Two weeks before the return date, on August 12, I had drafted and signed a Motion to Compel Arbitration and Stay Proceedings. I had used SoloSuit, a self-help legal service that generates state-specific pleadings for pro se defendants, to produce the document. The motion was five numbered paragraphs long. It asserted that the contract attached to Plaza's complaint contained a binding arbitration provision, that the agreement was attached to the motion as well, and that the motion was being brought pursuant to Wisconsin Statute § 788.02 — the section of Wisconsin law that authorizes a court to stay a pending action to permit arbitration. I filed it on August 14.

The motion was not a sophisticated piece of legal drafting. It cited one Wisconsin statute and no case law. It did not anticipate or address potential opposition. It did not engage with the federal-versus-state choice-of-law question that the NetCredit clause's reference to the Federal Arbitration Act might have raised. What it did was invoke the arbitration provision and ask the court to enforce it. That was all that was required.

Plaza did not file written opposition. At the October 30 hearing, before Court Commissioner Wendy Sue Johnson, Bravo agreed on Plaza's behalf to proceed with arbitration. The argument Bravo did make was procedural: that I had failed, in the time since filing the motion, to elect and notify Plaza which arbitration administrator I had chosen. Bravo offered to adjourn for thirty days to allow me to do so. Commissioner Johnson ordered me to elect and notify Plaza of my choice of arbitrator within thirty days, and directed Bravo to prepare the formal order. A review hearing was scheduled for December 1, 2025.

I left the courthouse with the bench ruling but without a written order. Bravo's office would draft and file the proposed order; Commissioner Johnson would sign it. In the meantime, the practical effect of the bench ruling was identical to a written order: the court had compelled arbitration, the proceedings were stayed, and the responsibility now sat with me to initiate the arbitration in the forum the contract designated.

The contract designated two: AAA or JAMS, at my election. I chose AAA. Three days after the hearing, on November 3, 2025, I filed a Demand for Arbitration with the American Arbitration Association. I named NetCredit and Plaza Services LLC as respondents. I paid the consumer filing fee of $200. The case was assigned AAA Case No. 01-25-0005-4657.

The choice between AAA and JAMS was, in retrospect, the decision around which everything else turned. I did not know, at the time I made it, that it would matter. I had picked AAA because I was vaguely more familiar with it as an institution and because its consumer-arbitration intake was online and accessible. The choice was unsophisticated. It happened to be the right one.

The reason it mattered requires a short detour into the architecture of AAA's consumer-arbitration program. Beginning in 1998, in response to academic and journalistic criticism of consumer arbitration, AAA developed the Consumer Due Process Protocol — a set of minimum procedural standards for consumer-arbitration cases. Over the following two decades, AAA layered additional compliance requirements on top of the Protocol. The most significant of these, for the purposes of this case, was the Consumer Clause Registry: a list of arbitration clauses that AAA has reviewed and certified for administration. Businesses that wish to have consumer disputes administered by AAA must, at minimum, register their clauses on the Registry and pay an annual registration fee. A clause not on the Registry is, for AAA's purposes, a clause AAA will not administer.

What I did not know on November 3, when I filed my AAA demand, was whether Plaza Services LLC was on the Registry. I would find out on December 1.

The formal written order compelling arbitration was signed by Commissioner Johnson on December 2, 2025. Bravo had filed the proposed order on November 24; the commissioner signed it eight days later. The order stayed the small-claims proceedings pending the outcome of arbitration. It did not dismiss the case. The distinction matters: a stayed case remains on the court's docket, available to be revived by either party if arbitration produces a result that requires court enforcement or if arbitration becomes unavailable for procedural reasons. A dismissed case, by contrast, would have to be refiled from scratch. The procedural posture the order created — stayed, not dismissed — would prove important four months later.

Two features of the order are worth surfacing.

The first is that Plaza's counsel drafted it. This is normal practice. Wisconsin courts, like most state courts, often direct the prevailing party at a hearing to prepare the proposed order for the court's signature. In this case, the party that drafted the order compelling arbitration was the party whose client had not registered its arbitration clause on the AAA's Consumer Clause Registry. Bravo's office produced an order directing Plaza to a forum Plaza had not satisfied the prerequisites to use. There is no indication in the record that anyone at Gurstel checked the Registry before drafting the order. There is no indication anyone checked it before opposing my motion to dismiss two months later.

The second is the gap between the bench ruling and the written order. I filed the AAA Demand for Arbitration on November 3, 2025 — four days after the bench ruling and twenty-nine days before Commissioner Johnson signed the written order. Nothing turned on this. I had the bench ruling, the bench ruling was the legal authority for proceeding to arbitration, and AAA's intake process did not require a signed order to begin. But the timing meant that, by the time the formal order was signed, AAA had already been in possession of my Demand for approximately four weeks. The first letter AAA would send to the parties — the letter that would change the case — was a day before the order itself was signed.

The Demand for Arbitration I filed with AAA on November 3, 2025 named two respondents: NetCredit, the original lender, and Plaza Services LLC, the assignee that had filed the underlying lawsuit. The case was assigned AAA Case No. 01-25-0005-4657 and routed into AAA's consumer-arbitration intake process. The intake process is, in the ordinary course, administrative. AAA's consumer-filing team reviews the demand, confirms that the dispute falls within AAA's jurisdiction under the named arbitration clause, confirms that the business respondent is on the Consumer Clause Registry, and — if everything checks out — opens the case and issues notices to the parties. My Demand sat in this process for twenty-eight days.

On December 1, 2025, AAA's Consumer Filing Team sent a letter to all parties. The letter was four pages long. It opened with a single sentence stating that the Claimant — me — had filed a Demand for Arbitration. The next paragraph was the consequential one.

AAA wrote that Plaza Services LLC had failed to comply with AAA's policies for consumer claims. The letter named the policies specifically: the Consumer Due Process Protocol, the Consumer Arbitration Rules, and the Consumer Clause Registry. The letter stated that Plaza had either failed to comply with these policies or had been removed from the Registry. The letter then stated AAA's conclusion in unambiguous terms: AAA "must decline to administer this claim and any other claims between Plaza Services, LLC and its consumers at this time." The Demand for Arbitration that had been pending for twenty-eight days was rejected at intake.

The letter noted that my Demand had also named NetCredit as a respondent. AAA stated that an amended demand naming only NetCredit could proceed against NetCredit alone, and gave me a deadline — December 15, 2025 — to elect that option. Absent such an election, AAA wrote, it would close the matter entirely and refund my filing fee.

A short detour is warranted here to clarify what AAA's decline letter actually represents in the consumer-arbitration system. AAA is not a court. It is a private alternative-dispute-resolution provider with discretion over which cases it administers and under what conditions. The Consumer Due Process Protocol that AAA developed in April 1998 commits AAA to refusing to administer cases brought under arbitration clauses that fail to meet AAA's minimum standards for consumer fairness — non-negotiable forum requirements, cost allocation, hearing-location accessibility, and so forth. The Consumer Clause Registry is the operational mechanism by which AAA enforces this commitment. A business that wants AAA to administer its consumer disputes registers its clause; AAA reviews the clause; if the clause is compliant, the business is added to the Registry and pays an annual maintenance fee. Businesses that drop off the Registry — whether by failure to renew, failure to maintain compliance, or affirmative withdrawal — lose access to AAA administration for their consumer disputes. The decline letter I received was AAA's standard form letter for cases where a business is not on the Registry at the time a consumer files a Demand.

The Registry mechanism is not obscure to consumer-defense lawyers. The National Consumer Law Center has published guidance on using the Registry to defeat arbitration requirements in debt-collection litigation. Federal appellate courts have held that businesses that fail to register their clauses cannot subsequently compel arbitration even by registering after the fact: in Bedgood v. Wyndham Vacation Resorts, Inc. (11th Cir. 2023) and Merritt Island Woodwerx, L.L.C. v. Space Coast Credit Union (11th Cir. 2025), the Eleventh Circuit ruled that consumer plaintiffs could remain in court after the defendant business had failed to register its arbitration clause at the time the consumer initiated arbitration. The Registry is well-known to the consumer-defense bar. It is invisible to most pro se defendants. That asymmetry is the operative fact of this case.

The decline was not the end of AAA's letter. The letter also told Plaza what it would have to do to restore access. AAA wrote that if Plaza were to advise AAA of its intention to comply with the Consumer Rules and the Protocol, and if Plaza were to register its clause on the Registry, AAA might — at its sole discretion — consider accepting newly filed consumer cases going forward. The letter made clear that the burden was on Plaza to initiate that process. AAA also wrote that, for previously declined matters like mine, the claimant — meaning me — would have to choose to re-file with AAA, or the underlying court could order arbitration to proceed there. Neither pathway was automatic.

The letter concluded with a procedural note. AAA wrote that I had the option to email the Consumer Filing Team if I believed the decline was in error. I did not. The decline was not in error.

AAA refunded my $200 filing fee. The refund check was issued on December 19, 2025 and cleared my account on January 4, 2026. My direct out-of-pocket investment in the arbitration AAA had declined to administer was, in the end, zero dollars.

On December 1, 2025 — the same day AAA's decline letter arrived — I wrote a letter to Chad Kowalewski at Gurstel Law Firm. The letter was a demand for voluntary dismissal with prejudice. It cited Wisconsin Statute § 805.04(1), which permits a plaintiff to dismiss its own action by stipulation, and gave Gurstel until December 15 to file the stipulation with the court. The letter attached AAA's decline letter and the NetCredit loan agreement. The legal argument was three sentences long: Plaza, as assignee of the NetCredit clause, was bound by an arbitration provision requiring administration by AAA or JAMS; AAA had declined to administer the case against Plaza due to Plaza's non-compliance with AAA's Consumer Arbitration Rules; the clause was, in operation, unenforceable on Plaza's part. I asked Gurstel to accept this conclusion and to spare both sides additional cost.

Gurstel did not respond by December 15. On December 16, I filed a Motion to Dismiss With Prejudice in Eau Claire County Circuit Court. The motion was brief — three paragraphs and a request for relief. It cited Wisconsin Statutes § 802.06(2)(a)10 and § 799.22(2), arguing that arbitration was unavailable due to Plaintiff's own fault. The motion attached the AAA decline letter.

Gurstel opposed in writing on December 30. The opposition letter, signed by Kowalewski, did two things. First, it asserted that, "upon further investigation and communication" with AAA, Plaza was now in good standing with the Registry and was prepared to proceed with arbitration. Second, it argued that, because arbitration was pending, the court was no longer the proper venue and should decline to rule on the Motion to Dismiss. The opposition letter attached no AAA correspondence. It produced no confirmation of Plaza's Registry status. It cited no rule under which the court should defer ruling. It was, in substance, an assertion.

I replied on January 6, 2026. My reply was a letter to Commissioner Johnson noting the absence of any documentation supporting Plaza's claim of good standing. It noted that AAA's December 1 letter had been explicit about what Plaza would have to do to restore Registry compliance, and that no evidence of any such restoration had been provided. It noted that AAA had refunded my filing fee — a fact, I argued, that was consistent with permanent closure of the matter rather than with Plaza's claimed return to good standing. I asked the court to grant the Motion to Dismiss.

Then the case went silent. The court docketed my reply on January 8, 2026. The next entry on the docket — a Notice of Hearing for an April 9, 2026 hearing on the Motion to Dismiss — was filed forty-nine days later, on February 26. The case sat for two months before the court scheduled it for resolution. There were no status conferences in this period. There were no additional filings by either side. There was no indication, anywhere on the docket, that Plaza was using the time to register its clause with AAA. The four-month gap between AAA's decline letter and the hearing on the Motion to Dismiss was, from Plaza's procedural perspective, a window. From the outside, looking at the record, the window appears not to have been used.

The hearing was held on April 9, 2026 at 2:00 PM before Court Commissioner Wendy Sue Johnson. Selena Bravo appeared by video for Plaza. I appeared in person. The court's minute order from the hearing is short enough to summarize in full: I stated the reason for my motion to dismiss; I stated that I had selected and notified Plaza of my choice of arbitrator; I stated that Plaza had not complied. I offered Exhibit 1 — AAA's December 1 decline letter — and the exhibit was received. Bravo, for Plaza, stated that Plaza was registered with AAA and that AAA had made a mistake by declining the arbitration. Bravo stated that Plaza had received a confirmation letter that it was registered. The court dismissed the case without prejudice. The hearing adjourned at 2:08 PM, eight minutes after it had begun. The formal order of dismissal was entered the following day.

A note on the without-prejudice posture. I had asked for dismissal with prejudice; the court granted only without prejudice, meaning Plaza retains the theoretical option to refile, subject to the statute of limitations. Courts generally do not impose with-prejudice dismissal as a sanction for procedural defects that the plaintiff might, in principle, cure. Plaza's failure to register its clause with AAA was, in theory, a curable defect. The court declined to treat it as a terminal one, even though Plaza had, in fact, failed to cure it in the months available. Plaza walked away with no judgment, no recovery, and no merits ruling — but with the bare technical possibility of trying again.

The procedural arc described in this account took approximately nine months. It produced no money for Plaza Services LLC, no judgment, no merits ruling. It cost Plaza $131.50 in filing fees, an unknown amount in service costs, and an unknown amount in attorney time at Gurstel Law Firm. It cost me, in direct outlays, the postage on several certified-mail filings and a $200 AAA filing fee that was refunded. The asymmetry is not, in the usual sense, financial. It is temporal and attentional. Plaza filed the case once. I filed an Answer, a Motion to Compel Arbitration, a Demand for Arbitration with AAA, a demand letter to Gurstel, a Motion to Dismiss, and a reply to opposition. I appeared at three hearings. I tracked the docket for nine months. The work was not difficult. It was sustained.

The economic model that debt-buyer litigation depends on assumes this work will not happen. Industry data has, for two decades, shown that the overwhelming majority of consumer defendants in debt-buyer cases do not respond to the complaint at all. Most cases end in default judgment within the first sixty to ninety days. Defendants who do respond rarely file motions; defendants who file motions rarely follow them through to administrative resolution. The procedural path that closed Plaza's case in Eau Claire County was available, in principle, the day Plaza's complaint arrived in my mailbox. It became available only because I chose to walk it. The choice was not legally sophisticated. It was, more than anything else, a choice to keep showing up.

The arbitration clause in the NetCredit loan agreement was drafted on the assumption that it would never be invoked. It almost never is. When it is, the question of whether the business that holds the contract — whether by origination or by assignment — has actually satisfied the threshold requirements of the forum the contract designates is, in most cases, a question that no one asks. AAA's Consumer Clause Registry exists because someone, at AAA, in the late 1990s, decided that the question should be asked. The Registry is a quiet piece of procedural infrastructure. It is invisible to most consumers and most lawyers. Plaza Services LLC, in litigating this case, appears not to have known about it, or to have assumed that no defendant would. That assumption held until December 1, 2025, when AAA's Consumer Filing Team sent a four-page letter to the parties and the assumption did not hold any longer.

The Plaza case is not isolated. AAA has, in past years, declined to administer arbitrations for some of the largest debt buyers in the country — including, in 2016, Midland Funding LLC. The Registry mechanism that closed Plaza's case in Eau Claire County is the same mechanism that has been used, in federal court, against debt buyers many times Plaza's size. What was distinctive about this case was not the mechanism. It was the defendant — a pro se defendant — happening to find it.

The case ended. The Registry remained.