The most heated rivalry in the NFL may not be on the field, but between Brian Flores’s lawyers and the league-appointed arbitrator Peter Harvey. Counsel for Flores—who is suing the NFL and six of its teams for racial discrimination—blasted Harvey in a four-page letter to him last week and a letter to a New York federal court Monday.
The NFL appointed Harvey just over 12 months ago to hear Flores’s case against the Dolphins and the NFL, which a federal court sent to arbitration along with co-plaintiffs Steve Wilks’s and Ray Horton’s discrimination complaints against their former teams.
Flores’s case against three other teams—the Giants, Broncos, and Texans—remains in federal court after a recent 2nd Circuit ruling.
It is that ruling—which raised questions about the NFL’s overall arbitration procedures and Harvey’s appointment—that underpins Flores’s motion for the lower court, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to reconsider its decision placing his case against the Dolphins in front of a league-appointed arbitrator. His lawyers have recently claimed that Harvey dragged the arbitration out from the beginning, and only now—when Flores wants the case stayed—the arbitrator is planning to plow forward.
“In the motion papers, we set forth the fact that you had abdicated and disregarded your role and obligations as an arbitrator by refusing to provide disclosures, rule on our disclosure motion or even communicate with the parties,” Flores’s lawyers wrote Harvey on Sept. 26.
“Incredibly, it was only after that submission, and before the NFL had to file its response, that you issued your correspondence in which you feigned a belief that the parties had agreed to a stay. It appears that your correspondence was an attempt to justify your inaction to date. Your correspondence also conveniently gives the NFL something to say in their opposition papers to defend the legitimacy of this so-called arbitration proceeding.”
In that Sept. 23 letter to the parties, Harvey wrote the 2nd Circuit ruling had not obviated the need for his proceeding. That drew a sharp reaction from Flores’s lawyers from Wigdor LLP, which wrote back, “[Y]our September 23, 2025 correspondence misstates that ‘The Second Circuit made it clear that the claims in this arbitration will stay in arbitration.’ … This statement could not be further from the truth—and evidences further bias on behalf of the NFL’s interests.”
Then in a letter to the lower court Monday, Wigdor lawyer David Gottlieb wrote, “Mr. Harvey is clearly attempting to push the arbitration forward and undermine this Court’s authority—after he took no action on a pending motion for arbitral disclosures for nine months.”
Flores’s side had been asking Harvey to disclose any potential conflicts of interest he might have in the role.
In an email to Harvey in 2023, NFL outside counsel had written that the league did not have an issue further delaying the arbitration. Flores’s lawyers attached the email as an exhibit to its letter Monday to the court. In light of the tension with Harvey, Flores asked the lower court to accelerate the timetable for the motion to reconsider its earlier ruling sending part of the case to arbitration.
