A buried onboarding clause was supposed to save the company. The delay killed it instead
An Ohio appeals court just stripped an employer of its arbitration right – because the company waited too long to use it.
The Ohio Court of Appeals, Eighth Appellate District, affirmed a trial court ruling on May 14, 2026, finding that King David Post Acute Nursing & Rehabilitation waived its right to push a former employee's discrimination case into arbitration. The reason was straightforward. The company spent seven and a half months behaving like an ordinary defendant before moving to enforce its arbitration agreement.
The case was brought by Ilona Yormick, who was terminated on July 2, 2024. She moved quickly. On July 29, 2024, she notified the company that she had retained counsel and intended to take legal action. On August 9, 2024, she filed a charge of discrimination with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission.
On December 3, 2024, she sued, alleging age discrimination and retaliation.
King David and two individual defendants answered the complaint on February 13, 2025. A co-defendant, Outcome Healthcare LLC, filed a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Attached to that motion, on March 13, 2025, was an affidavit from King David's nursing home administrator, H. Jason Black. The exhibits included Yormick's onboarding documents and the arbitration agreement itself.
From that point, King David had the agreement in hand. But the litigation rolled on. Between March and July 2025, the defendants joined a case-management conference, traded discovery requests, asked for extensions, served responses, and discussed deposition dates. King David did not move to stay the case pending arbitration until July 21, 2025 – seven and a half months after the lawsuit was filed, and nearly a year after Yormick first signaled legal action.
The trial court refused the stay. It found the request untimely under the arbitration agreement's own one-year limitation clause, and separately found that King David had waived the right to arbitrate. Looking at the dates, the company's active participation in the case, and the fact that the arbitration agreement had been sitting in its own administrator's affidavit, the court concluded that the defendants had acted inconsistently with their right to arbitration.
The appeals court agreed. Writing for the majority, Judge Sean C. Gallagher walked through the totality-of-the-circumstances test Ohio courts apply to arbitration waiver. The factors include whether the company invoked the court's jurisdiction without asking for a stay, how long it delayed, how much it participated in litigation, and whether the other side was prejudiced. No single factor controls.
King David argued the timeliness question belonged to an arbitrator, not a judge. It also pointed to a substitution of counsel, saying new lawyers moved to enforce arbitration as soon as they spotted the agreement. The appeals court was not persuaded. As the trial court had observed in distinguishing one of the cases King David relied on, the defendants were never without counsel during the litigation. Switching law firms did not reset the clock.
The takeaway for HR leaders is direct. An arbitration clause in onboarding paperwork is not a fire-and-forget protection. It only works if the company invokes it early – before answers are filed, before discovery starts, before case-management deadlines pile up. Routine litigation conduct can quietly burn the right away. And once it is gone, the case stays in court.
Judge Emanuella D. Groves concurred. Judge Mary J. Boyle concurred separately, noting that the central question is not whether arbitration was raised in the first answer but whether the company's overall conduct lined up with the right to arbitrate. Here, it did not.
The judgment is final at the appellate level.
The case is Yormick v. King David Post Acute Nursing & Rehab., L.L.C., 2026-Ohio-1776.
