The ceasefire has collapsed. In a dramatic new twist to an already volatile legal brawl, Keller Postman LLC has accused Tubi Inc. of reneging on a carefully brokered settlement that sought to cool a high-stakes arbitration dispute — one that could engulf over 24,000 individual claims.
The plaintiffs’ firm struck back Thursday, filing a scorching rebuttal in Washington, D.C., federal court, insisting it upheld every term of the January 2024 agreement and blasting Tubi for allegedly distorting the deal in an effort to regain courtroom leverage.
“Tubi is unhappy with the results of the process it bargained for,” Keller Postman fired off in the court filing, arguing the streaming service is attempting to relitigate what it already agreed to.
The Anatomy of a Legal Standoff
The origins of this bitter conflict trace back to Tubi’s 2023 lawsuit against Keller Postman, accusing the firm of disrupting a $20 million class action settlement by persuading clients to opt out and instead bombarding the platform with thousands of arbitration claims related to alleged user agreement violations and targeted advertising — claims rooted in California discrimination law.
The parties had reached a fragile agreement in January, forged in a 45-minute courtroom recess during a December hearing that saw tensions boiling over. U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, exasperated by the escalating feud, warned she would not “deal with a bunch of people taking potshots at each other,” threatening to open the gates to “total open warfare.”
The resulting pact was supposed to change the tide. Keller Postman dropped its California lawsuit and ethics-based motion to disqualify Jenner & Block LLP, Tubi’s legal team. In exchange, Tubi and Jenner & Block agreed to halt their D.C. and Delaware lawsuits, and both sides agreed to procedural terms for arbitration — most notably, allowing 10 arbitrators instead of just one to handle the sprawling mass of claims.
