Arbitration Has Come to Senior Living. You Don’t Have to Sign Up.

What the Jinks family wanted was to sue the memory care facility where their father, Charles, was attacked by another resident.

It happened in October 2020, after Hurricane Laura forced his hasty evacuation from a similar facility in Louisiana. His three children moved him, at 80 years old and diagnosed with dementia, into Brookdale Dowlen Oaks in Beaumont, Texas. They installed a Ring camera in his room so they could keep an eye on him.

That camera showed another resident entering his room while he slept one night and battering Mr. Jinks with the heavy lid of a toilet tank, sending him to an emergency room with fractured facial bones and lacerations. It took 11 staples to close the biggest wound.

After Mr. Jinks recuperated and the family recovered from its shock, they consulted a lawyer. “We wanted Brookdale to be accountable for this,” said his daughter Charlene Jinks Young, 61. “I wanted 12 people” — a jury — “to hear this story.”

But before a court could hear their lawsuit accusing the company of gross negligence, the family had to get past an arbitration clause in Brookdale’s residency agreement. Ms. Young, using her father’s power of attorney, had signed it the day the family moved him in.

It stipulated that in the event of disputes, residents must submit to binding arbitration. A lawyer, not a judge or jury, would rule on their claims, with the parties required to split the proceeding’s costs.