In Green Tree Financial Corp.-Alabama. v. Randolph (2000) 531 U.S. 79, Larketta Randolph sued Green Tree Financial Corporation and its subsidiary (hereafter referred to collectively as Green Tree) for violations of the federal Truth in Lending Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in federal district court. (531 U.S. at pp. 82-83.) "In lieu of an answer, Green Tree filed a motion to compel arbitration, to stay the action, or, in the alternative, to dismiss. The District Court granted Green Tree's motion to compel arbitration, denied the motion to stay, and dismissed Randolph's claims with prejudice." ( Id. at p. 83.) In that case, consumer groups attacked the high cost of arbitration. In an amicus brief, the AAA defended its practices as follows: "The AAA's experience indicates that arbitrators reallocate the costs of arbitration in a majority of the commercial cases that proceed to award. A claimant with a meritorious claim thus has a statistically significant likelihood of recovering at least a portion of any costs he or she is required to advance under the Commercial Arbitration Rules." Further, with regard to situations, such as the present case, involving financial hardship, the AAA, in the same brief to the Supreme Court stated, "The AAA has administrative procedures that allow deferrals or reductions in the AAA's administrative fees where extreme hardship on the part of a party makes paying or advancing some or all of such fees inappropriate. The AAA receives one or two requests each week for a waiver or deferral of administrative fees on the basis of economic hardship. When the hardship is substantiated, these requests are liberally granted." (id.) The Supreme Court reviewed the order compelling arbitration, holding that "where . . . the District Court has ordered the parties to proceed to arbitration, and dismissed all the claims before it, that decision is 'final' within the meaning of section 16(a)(3) of the FAA, and therefore appealable." ( Id. at p. 89.) The court noted, however, that "had the District Court entered a stay instead of a dismissal in this case, that order would not be appealable. 9 U.S.C. 16(b)(1). The question whether the District Court should have taken that course is not before us, and we do not address it." ( Id. at p. 87, fn. 2.Randolph wished to have nullified The arbitration clause. She contended that the "arbitration agreement's silence with respect to costs and fees created a risk that she would be required to bear prohibitive arbitration costs . . . and thereby forced her to forego" her claims. Id. at 90. The Court recognized that the existence of large arbitration costs could preclude a litigant from effectively vindicating her right, but found the record absent of any proof of those costs. Id. at 81. Thus, the Court deemed the "risk" of prohibitive costs "too speculative to justify the invalidation of the arbitration agreement." Id. at 91. The Supreme Court adopted a case-by-case approach to determining whether fees imposed under an arbitration agreement deny a potential litigant the opportunity to vindicate his or her rights. 531 U.S. at 92. It also placed the burden upon the party seeking to invalidate the agreement to demonstrate that arbitration would be prohibitively expensive. Id. Additionally, Randolph dictates that arbitration agreements are enforceable in the absence of individualized evidence to establish that the costs of arbitration are prohibitive. Id. at 91-92. "To invalidate the arbitration agreement on that speculative basis would undermine the liberal federal policy favoring arbitration." Id. at 91. In Green Tree Fin. Corp. v. Randolph, the party resisting arbitration cited what she claimed were American Arbitration Association (AAA) figures on arbitration costs, but she provided no evidence that the AAA would actually conduct the arbitration or charge her the fees she identified. 121 S. Ct. at 522 & n.6. Because of this uncertainty, the Supreme Court deemed the evidence insufficient to defeat arbitration. See id.The Supreme Court stated: "It may well be that the existence of large arbitration costs could preclude a litigant such as the plaintiff from effectively vindicating her federal statutory rights in the arbitral forum. But the record does not show that the plaintiff will bear such costs if she goes to arbitration. Indeed, it contains hardly any information on the matter. As the Court of Appeals recognized, 'we lack ... information about how claimants fare under Green Tree's arbitration clause.' The record reveals only the arbitration agreement's silence on the subject, and that fact alone is plainly insufficient to render it unenforceable. The 'risk' that the plaintiff will be saddled with prohibitive costs is too speculative to justify the invalidation of an arbitration agreement." (Id. at pp. 90-91.) The Supreme Court declined to invalidate the arbitration agreement based on speculation as to costs because doing so "would undermine the 'liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements'" and "conflict with our prior holdings that the party resisting arbitration bears the burden of proving that the claims at issue are unsuitable for arbitration." (Green Tree, supra, 531 U.S. at p. 91.) The court concluded: "We believe that where, as here, a party seeks to invalidate an arbitration agreement on the ground that arbitration would be prohibitively expensive, that party bears the burden of showing the likelihood of incurring such costs. The plaintiff did not meet that burden. How detailed the showing of prohibitive expense must be before the party seeking arbitration must come forward with contrary evidence is a matter we need not discuss ... ." (Id. at p. 92.) In sum, the plaintiff, a purchaser of a mobilehome, sued her lender for violation of federal statutes, including the Truth in Lending Act, 15 United States Code section 1601 et seq. (TILA). (Green Tree, supra, 531 U.S. at pp. 82-83.) The plaintiff's agreement with the lender included a binding arbitration clause covering all statutory claims. (Id. at p. 83, fn. 1.) The agreement was silent on the issue of allocating costs of arbitration. (Id. at pp. 83, fn. 1, 89.) The district court granted the lender's motion to compel arbitration, but the court of appeals reversed, holding the agreement "posed a risk that the plaintiff's ability to vindicate her statutory rights would be undone by 'steep' arbitration costs, and therefore was unenforceable." (Id. at pp. 83-84.) The United States Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals. (Green Tree, supra, 531 U.S. at p. 84.) The Supreme Court recognized that statutory claims are arbitrable under the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 United States Code section 1 et seq. (FAA), unless Congress expressed a contrary intent, because "'"so long as the prospective litigant effectively may vindicate his or her statutory cause of action in the arbitral forum,"' the statute serves its functions." (Green Tree, supra, 531 U.S. at p. 90.) Because the TILA did not "evince an intention to preclude a waiver of judicial remedies," the court turned to the plaintiff's assertion the arbitration agreement's silence on costs and fees created the risk that prohibitive arbitration costs would leave her unable to vindicate her statutory rights. (Green Tree, supra, 531 U.S. at p. 90.)