Kerry Gibbons, Author at TCPA Blog

On July 18, 2023, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed a TCPA claim filed by serial Plaintiff, Andrew Perrong. Perrong v. Montgomery Cnty. Democratic Comm., No. 22-4475, 2023 WL 4600423 (E.D. Pa. July 18, 2023). You can read our prior coverage of Perrong decisions here and here.

The present case centers around three phone calls Perrong received from the Montgomery County Democratic Committee and its associates. Perrong claimed that Defendants violated the TCPA by using an ATDS to contact him. The Defendants moved to dismiss the case, arguing that Perrong’s complaint failed to state a claim because the device at issue randomly or sequentially dialed phone numbers from a preexisting list (such as a list of registered voters), rather than randomly producing phone numbers itself, and therefore did not qualify as an automatic telephone dialing system.

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.

TCPA Blog

Author Archives: Kerry Gibbons

E.D. Pa. Dismisses Serial Plaintiff’s TCPA Case on ATDS Grounds

Does Unused “Capacity” Make a Dialer an ATDS? District Court Says “No” in Ruling on Pleading Requirements After Facebook