A recent denial of a professional plaintiff’s motion for class certification shows that, irrespective of whether such plaintiffs have standing to sue on their own behalf, courts are increasingly skeptical that contrived claims are amenable to class treatment. See Hirsch v. USHealth Advisors, LLC, No. 4:18-CV-00245-P, 2020 WL 7186380, at *1 (N.D. Tex. Dec. 7, 2020).
Continue reading “Professional Plaintiff Who Manufactured Claims Can Sue But Can’t Represent Class”
The Southern District of Florida recently dismissed a TCPA claim sua sponte for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, finding that the plaintiff had not alleged a concrete injury-in-fact. See Perez v. Golden Trust Insurance, Inc., 470 F. Supp. 3d 1327 (S.D. Fla. 2020).
Perez alleged that Golden Trust had violated the TCPA when, without his consent, it used an ATDS to send two telemarketing text messages to his cell phone. Golden Trust argued that the complaint should be dismissed because Perez did not properly allege the use of an ATDS.
As we have reported here and here, courts throughout the country, including most notably the Eleventh Circuit in Salcedo v. Hanna, have grappled with the question of whether a single unsolicited text message may constitute sufficient injury to satisfy the constitutional standing requirement in Article III. The Salcedo court held that one text message does not suffice.
But what about a single fax? That was the question recently presented to the Middle District of Florida in Daisy, Inc. v. Mobile Mini, Inc., No. 20-0017 (M.D. Fla. Sept. 24, 2020). The court similarly found that, at least under the relatively unique circumstances of the case, a single fax did not confer standing.
Continue reading “Single Fax Received by E-Mail Deemed Insufficient to Confer Article III Standing”
In a pair of recent opinions, two U.S. district courts in different parts of Texas expressed inconsistent views on a topic we have been following closely: whether plaintiffs who receive just a single unwanted text message can establish a concrete injury for Article III standing.
Continue reading “Texas District Courts Remain Divided on Standing for Single-Text TCPA Plaintiffs”
The Southern District of Florida recently dismissed a TCPA putative class action for lack of standing, finding that the plaintiff could not show he suffered a concrete injury-in-fact. Reinforcing Eleventh Circuit precedent, the court held both that the number and infrequency of the text messages at issue was insufficient to support plaintiff’s loss of privacy, waste of time, and intrusion upon seclusion allegations and that he failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the texts depleted his cell phone battery or negatively impacted his data and messaging plan. Eldridge v. Pet Supermarket Inc., No. 18-22531, 2020 WL 1475094 (S.D. Fla. Mar. 10, 2020).
In Eldridge, plaintiff alleged that defendant used an ATDS to send him seven advertising and telemarketing text messages without his consent, in violation of the TCPA. Plaintiff received the first two messages after he texted defendant’s number in order to enter a raffle for free pet food. They confirmed plaintiff’s entry in the raffle, provided a link to the raffle’s rules, and stated that plaintiff consented to receive automated text messages from defendant. The next five messages, sent over approximately three months, contained coupon codes and information regarding upcoming pet adoption events. Plaintiff alleged that all seven text messages “‘invaded [his] privacy, intruded upon his seclusion and solitude, wasted his time by requiring him to open and read the messages, depleted his cellular telephone battery, and caused him to incur a usage allocation deduction to his text messaging or data plan.’” Id. at *2.
A federal court presiding over a civil RICO action recently ordered prolific plaintiff’s attorney Jeffrey Lohman to produce his firm’s communications with its clients. See Navient Sols., LLC v. Law Offices of Jeffrey Lohman, P.C., No. 19-461, 2020 WL 1172696, at *1 (E.D. Va. Mar. 11, 2020). This decision shows that the crime-fraud exception may overcome the attorney–client privilege where a lawyer allegedly participates in a scheme to manufacture TCPA claims. It also suggests that such conduct might form the basis of a civil RICO claim.
The plaintiff in that case, Navient Solutions, alleged that the defendants, including Lohman, operated a fraudulent scheme to manufacture TCPA lawsuits. The defendants allegedly recruited student-debtors into signing up for a sham debt-relief program and told them to stop making loan payments owed to Navient, to pay defendants instead, and to follow a script to induce telephone calls from Navient that would — and ultimately did — form the basis for TCPA claims that were filed by Lohman and others. After patiently uncovering these facts in discovery in various TCPA cases, Navient went on the offensive by bringing a civil RICO claim predicated on alleged mail and wire fraud involved in the scheme.
In a decision released on February 19 that relied principally on rules of grammar, the Seventh Circuit held that to be an ATDS under the TCPA, a device must be capable of storing or producing telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator, not merely capable of storing numbers. Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, Inc., No. 19-1738 (7th Cir. Feb. 19, 2020). As such, it affirmed the District Court’s decision (albeit based on a different interpretation of the TCPA) that granted summary judgment in favor of AT&T where AT&T’s customer management tool “dials numbers only from a customer database.” In so holding, the Seventh Circuit joined the Third Circuit’s and the Eleventh Circuit’s (which we blogged about here) narrow interpretation of ATDS and widened the split with the Ninth Circuit’s expansive interpretation. Compare Glasser v. Hilton Grand Vacations Co., 2020 WL 415811 (11th Cir. Jan. 27, 2020) & Dominguez v. Yahoo, Inc., 894 F.3d 116, 119 (3d Cir. 2018) with Marks v. Crunch San Diego, 904 F.3d 1041 (9th Cir. 2018).
Does a “call placed in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, without any allegation or showing of injury—even that plaintiffs heard the phone ring—suffice to establish concrete injury for purposes of Article III [of the Constitution?]” Recently, Dish Network petitioned the Supreme Court to resolve this question and overturn a verdict rendered by a North Carolina federal jury that was later trebled to $61 million and upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Briefing on Dish Network’s petition is now complete and we now await the Court’s decision on whether it will review the case.
Continue reading “Briefing in Dish Network’s Petition to the Supreme Court Complete”
The Eleventh Circuit last week issued a common-sense ruling vacating class certification in a TCPA case—an area of the law where common sense does not always prevail. In Cordoba v. DIRECTV, LLC, No. 19-12077 (11th Cir. Nov. 15, 2019), the named plaintiff claimed that DIRECTV violated the TCPA when Telecel, the company it had contracted with to provide telemarketing services, failed to maintain an internal “do-not-call list” of individuals who had requested not to receive telemarketing calls on behalf of DIRECTV. Cordoba sought to represent a class of all persons who had received more than one telemarketing call during the period of time that Telecel had failed to maintain a do-not-call list for DIRECTV. The district court certified the class, failing to consider that the class as defined would include many members—mostly members, potentially—who had never asked to be placed on the do-not-call list. Having never made this request, the Eleventh Circuit said, those members lacked standing because their injuries were not traceable to Telecel’s alleged failure to maintain the list. Furthermore, because distributing an award would require the district court to confirm whether a class member had a traceable injury, individualized inquiries predominated over common questions. The district court’s failure to consider these individualized questions of standing and predominance doomed its certification order.
Continue reading “Lack of Widespread Harm Traceable to TCPA Violation Requires Decertification of Class Action, Eleventh Circuit Rules”
Last year, this blog analyzed whether and when professional plaintiffs have standing to assert TCPA claims. A Massachusetts District Court recently examined that issue and held that a plaintiff’s standing “boils down to” how a plaintiff uses a given phone line.
In Rhodes v. Liberty Power Holdings, LLC, No. 18-10506, 2019 WL 4645524 (D. Mass. Sept. 24, 2019), the Court examined TCPA claims brought by two representatives of a putative class. One of them, Samuel Katz (“Katz”), fits the profile of a professional plaintiff, as he is a “frequent litigant in TCPA cases” who “closely tracks the telemarketing calls he receives.” Katz has served over two dozen TCPA demand letters and has filed at least nine TCPA lawsuits. In the present matter, he alleges that he received thirteen automated calls to a “residential landline that he maintained for emergencies.”