Three months after the Supreme Court’s landmark Facebook ruling, a growing number of trial courts have grappled with interpreting and applying the High Court’s directive. One of the more interesting decisions came out of the Eastern District of Michigan recently. In Barry v. Ally Fin., Inc., No. 20-cv-12378, 2021 WL 2936636, at *1-7 (E.D. Mich. July 13, 2021), the district court dismissed a putative TCPA class action on the grounds that the plaintiff failed to allege use of an ATDS. More significantly, the district court interpreted Facebook to hold that to be an ATDS, the dialing system must actually use a random or sequential number generator to call the plaintiff, and not merely have the capacity to do so.
S.D. Cal. Court Dismisses Claims, Finding Text Messages at Issue Were Not “Telephone Solicitations”
The Southern District of California recently granted (in part) a motion to dismiss in Gross v. GG Homes, Inc., 2021 WL 2863623 (S.D. Cal. 2021), because the text messages at issue were not “telephone solicitations” within the meaning of the TCPA. Notably, the Court found that the text messages did not qualify as solicitations because they were “targeted at procuring services from Plaintiff” (as opposed to selling something to Plaintiff).
Plaintiff alleged that Defendant (a real estate firm) violated the TCPA when it sent text messages (and placed calls) to her cell phone. Defendant filed a motion to dismiss challenging her Article III standing as well as the sufficiency of her factual allegations for her TCPA claims. The Court began by rejecting Defendant’s arguments that Plaintiff lacked standing, that Plaintiff failed to allege facts showing that Defendant might be responsible for the texts at issue, and that Plaintiff failed to allege that Defendant used an ATDS to send the text messages. But the Court agreed with Defendant that Plaintiff’s § 227(c) claims—based on sending the text messages to a number on the national Do-Not-Call Registry—must be dismissed.
Facebook Decision Upends TCPA Litigation Landscape
TCPA Blog’s Mike Daly co-authored an article for the ABA about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, which clarifies the TCPA’s definition of an ATDS. The article explains that the unanimous decision is a victory for businesses because it limits the scope of the statute’s restriction on autodialing and because it should drastically decrease the volume of litigation arising under that part of the statute, which has been one of the most active areas of litigation in recent years. But the article also predicted that the ruling may cause plaintiffs’ counsel to focus on other calling restrictions, for example its restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices, Do-Not-Call restrictions, and even faxes.
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