Key Points

  • The Supreme Court of Ohio unanimously held that the juvenile court and Local 860 must arbitrate whether their two collective-bargaining agreements expired or were void under their evergreen clauses.
  • Under the Ohio Arbitration Act's severability rule, a court must determine whether a challenge to a contract's formation is also a challenge to the formation of its arbitration clause.
  • The parties' mutual promises to arbitrate supplied sufficient consideration to enforce the arbitration clauses even while the juvenile court challenged the consideration for the agreements as a whole.
  • Disputes over the duration and evergreen clauses, including whether those clauses render the contracts void ab initio, fall within the arbitration clauses' coverage of interpretation and application disputes.
  • The court affirmed the Eighth District and remanded to the trial court to order the parties to arbitration.

The Supreme Court of Ohio on Tuesday ordered Cuyahoga County's juvenile court to take its fight with a public-employee union to an arbitrator, holding that the court's claim that its labor contracts were void from the start did not free it from the arbitration clauses written into those contracts.

The decision was unanimous. Justice Fischer wrote for the court, joined by Chief Justice Kennedy and Justices DeWine, Brunner, Deters, Hawkins and Shanahan. The ruling affirmed the Eighth District Court of Appeals in favor of Laborers' International Union of North America, Local 860.

The case turned on the severability rule, a doctrine under the Ohio Arbitration Act that treats an arbitration clause as a separate contract inside the larger agreement, so that an attack on the whole agreement generally goes to the arbitrator. The court held that some challenges to whether a contract was ever formed defeat that rule and others do not, and that a judge must decide whether a formation challenge also reaches the arbitration clause itself.

The juvenile court signed collective-bargaining agreements with Local 860 covering two groups of employees, those at the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center and those working for the court in other roles. Each agreement said it would remain in force until December 31, 2019. Each also contained an evergreen clause, a provision keeping the contract's terms in effect after that date until a successor agreement was negotiated, the union disclaimed interest, or the employees voted to decertify the union.

When talks on new contracts failed, the juvenile court, acting through Administrative Judge Thomas F. O'Malley, filed two declaratory-judgment suits in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. It asked for rulings that the agreements had expired at the end of 2019 or were void ab initio, meaning invalid from their inception, for lack of consideration and as contrary to public policy because of the evergreen clauses. When Local 860 emailed a grievance, the court's administrator replied that the juvenile court was "no longer processing grievances."

Local 860 counterclaimed for breach of contract and moved to compel arbitration. The trial court held that the agreements were valid and had been extended past 2019, but that public policy under R.C. Chapter 4117 capped the extension at December 31, 2020. It found the juvenile court liable for withdrawing recognition early, awarded the union the dues it would have collected in December 2020, ruled that the union's email was not a grievance, and declined to address arbitrability.

Both sides appealed. The Eighth District held that the trial court should have granted the motion to arbitrate because the disputes centered on the duration and evergreen clauses, and the agreements assigned interpretation of their terms to the arbitrator. The appeals court added that even if the agreements had expired, the duty to arbitrate had "post-expiration effect."

Before the Supreme Court, the juvenile court argued that the existence of a valid contract is a question for a judge, not an arbitrator. It contended that the evergreen clauses bound it in perpetuity, in conflict with a 1985 decision recognizing a court employer's discretion over whether to bargain collectively with its employees. It also argued that the severability rule covers challenges to a contract's validity but not to its formation, and that a lack-of-consideration claim attacks formation.

Local 860 responded that the agreements expire only when one of the evergreen clauses' three conditions occurs, that those conditions do not guarantee a perpetual contract, and that the dispute is one of contract interpretation within the arbitration clauses' scope.

Justice Fischer wrote that the juvenile court "is right that the severability rule may not always apply." He cited a 2025 Fourth Circuit decision, Johnson v. Continental Finance Co., which stated that the rule does not reach formation challenges because "[t]here is nothing to enforce if a contract never existed," and the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Granite Rock Co. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters that a dispute over an arbitration clause's formation is typically for a court.

But "not all issues of contract formation concerning the underlying contract will override the severability rule," Justice Fischer wrote. He set apart disputes over whether a contract was ever signed or whether the signer lacked capacity to assent, which may prevent severance, from claims like fraudulent inducement. In ABM Farms Inc. v. Woods, a 1998 case, the Ohio court held that a fraudulent-inducement claim against a contract did not affect its arbitration provision.

"What is clear from the caselaw on these issues is that a court must determine whether a challenge to a contract's formation is also a challenge to the formation of its arbitration clause," he wrote. Applying that test, the court concluded that "the juvenile court's challenge to the formation of the collective-bargaining agreements is not a challenge to the formation of the arbitration clauses."

The signatures on the agreements showed that the juvenile court intended to enter into them, the court wrote, and the existence of the arbitration clauses was undisputed. The parties' mutual promises to arbitrate supplied their own consideration, the court held, so the clauses were enforceable "even when the overall consideration of the collective-bargaining agreements is being challenged."

The court then held that the dispute fell within the clauses, which cover any disagreement "as to the interpretation or application of, or compliance with, an express provision" of the agreements. Questions about the duration and evergreen clauses, "including whether to interpret the evergreen clauses as rendering the contracts void ab initio for a lack of consideration, fall squarely within the scope of the arbitration clauses," Justice Fischer wrote.

The opinion did not separately address the juvenile court's second argument, that a court employer cannot be perpetually bound to the terms of a collective-bargaining agreement.

R. Todd Hunt of Roetzel & Andress represented the juvenile court. Local 860 was represented by Joseph J. Guarino III of Mangano Law Offices.

The court remanded the case to the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to order the parties to proceed to arbitration. The slip opinion, 2026-Ohio-4192, is subject to formal revision before publication in the Ohio Official Reports.