District Court grants motion to dismiss TCPA claim

Courts TCPA U.S. Supreme Court Autodialer

On June 24, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted a motion to dismiss a putative class action suit, in which the plaintiff alleged that the defendant sent messages using an “automatic telephone dialing system” (autodialer) within the meaning of the TCPA. As previously covered by a Buckley Special Alert, in April the U.S. Supreme Court in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid narrowed the definition of what type of equipment qualifies as an autodialer under the TCPA, a federal statute that generally prohibits calls or texts placed by autodialers without the prior express consent of the called party. In this district court case, the platform utilized by the defendant to contact the plaintiff allegedly placed calls only to phone numbers supplied by consumers when signing up for the defendant’s services. The plaintiff alleged that the platform nonetheless qualified as an autodialer because it used a “random number generator to determine the order in which to pick from the preproduced list of consumer phone numbers, such that it does qualify as an autodialer.” The plaintiff claimed this feature brought the platform within the TCPA’s definition of an autodialer, referring to a line from footnote 7 of the Duguid opinion. That footnote states that “an autodialer might use a random number generator to determine the order in which to pick phone numbers from a preproduced list. It would then store those numbers to be dialed at a later time.” However, in the order, the district court rejected the plaintiff’s argument as inconsistent with the rationale in Facebook and an “acontextual reading” of the footnote.  In rejecting the argument, the court explained that  under Facebook’s holding, “to qualify as an autodialer, a device must have ‘the capacity to use a random or sequential number generator to either store or produce phone numbers to be called.” The district court found that defendant’s platform was only texting customers who had already provided their contact information. As a result, the platform did not qualify as an autodialer as a matter of law and the court dismissed plaintiff’s TCPA claim without leave to amend.