Ares Management
Financials
48
out of 100. Number 229 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where Ares Management does well
- Renewals 0 of 20. Nothing found.
- Ares does not sell your personal information: the GLBA table explicitly says it does NOT share for its own marketing purposes, joint marketing, or non-affiliates' marketing, and ARCC's privacy text states 'we do not permit third parties to rent, sell, trade or otherwise release or disclose information.'
- The arbitration clause is one of the more honest ones - it prominently warns at the top that a class action waiver exists, offers a real (if burdensome) 30-day opt-out, carves out IP-infringement suits, and allows phone/video or written arbitration for claims of $10,000 or less.
- On privacy policy changes, ARCC commits to notify recordholders BEFORE making changes - better than the terms-of-use unilateral-change treatment.
- The July 2025 Candidate Privacy Notice lays out full CCPA rights (know, correct, delete, opt out, non-discrimination) with email, phone (866-501-0672) and mail channels, and states it does not sell or share applicants' data.
Simply visiting aresmgmt.com binds you to binding individual arbitration with no jury and no class actions.
The fine print
6 clauses and findings from the draft archive, dated 1 October 2026. The plain English comes first; the small print is the company's own words. None of these has been checked yet.
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Simply visiting aresmgmt.com binds you to binding individual arbitration with no jury and no class actions. Opting out requires mailing a personally signed letter to the General Counsel in Los Angeles within 30 days of first agreeing - a deliberately burdensome hoop.
"You and Ares agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen or may arise between you and Ares in connection with the Ares Sites... shall be resolved exclusively through confidential, final, and binding arbitration... YOU ARE GIVING UP THE RIGHT TO LITIGATE A DISPUTE IN COURT BEFORE A JUDGE OR JURY... You and Ares agree that each of us may bring claims against the other only on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative action or proceeding."
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Ares can rewrite the terms whenever it wants without telling you first; just keeping visiting the site counts as accepting the new terms. Your only option if you dislike them is to leave.
"You agree that we may modify the terms of this Agreement in our sole discretion, without advance notice... If you object to any such modifications, your sole recourse shall be to cease using the Ares Sites. You will be deemed to have agreed to the new Agreement if you continue to access the Ares Sites after the passage of 30 days from the time the revised Agreement is first posted."
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Anything you send through the site - even a contact-form message or idea - becomes Ares's to use forever, anywhere, for any purpose, transferable to others, and you have no right to take it back or delete it.
"[You] grant us (and our affiliates) a royalty-free, unrestricted, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully transferable, assignable and sublicensable right and license to use the Submitted Material (in whole or part) in any manner... Further, we do not guarantee that you will be able to edit or delete any Submitted Materials you have submitted."
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Leaving as a client does not stop Ares from sharing your personal information with affiliates and service providers the same way it always did - there is no clean break when the relationship ends.
"When you are no longer an Ares' client, we continue to share your information as described in this notice."
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If Ares is acquired or sells assets, your non-public personal information goes along with the deal to the new owner - you have no say and no opt-out.
"In the event of a corporate change in control resulting from, for example, a sale to, or merger with, another entity, or in the event of a sale of assets, we reserve the right to transfer nonpublic personal information of holders of our securities to the new party in control or the party acquiring assets."
Privacy Policy text as filed in ARCC SEC filings (Q4 2024 10-K / 424B2 prospectus) -
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If many people have the same complaint, Ares forces claims into a slow staged process where most claims wait indefinitely while a handful go first - a built-in mechanism to discourage collective claims even without a class action.
"If, at any time, 25 or more claimants (including you) each submit a Demand or seek to file demands for arbitration raising similar claims against Ares... Counsel for the claimants and counsel for Ares shall each select 15 claims per side (30 claims total) to be filed and to proceed in individual arbitrations as part of a staged process... Any remaining claims shall not be filed or be deemed filed in arbitration... You acknowledge and agree that your election to participate in a Mass Arbitration may result in a delay in the adjudication of your dispute with Ares."
How these were found
Terms of Use read in full via browser (Effective May 1, 2026) at https://www.arescre.com/acre-terms-of-use, which explicitly covers aresmgmt.com and all Ares Sites. Privacy Policy details come from indexed official-domain snippets of http://www.arcc.com/privacy-policy (direct fetch timed out, so the full page was not read line-by-line); corroborated by the identical GLBA privacy text in SEC-filed ARCC prospectus/10-K documents. Ares Candidate Privacy Notice (July 2025) used for CCPA/rights points. Ares is a B2B/institutional asset manager with essentially no consumer surface (no subscriptions, no consumer accounts, no checkout) - score kept modest accordingly and reflects only what actually exists in public-facing legal documents.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.