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  • District court orders TCPA suit to mediation, states FCC’s interpretation of autodialer may take years

    Courts

    On February 1, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri issued an order referring the parties in a putative TCPA class action to mediation. The plaintiff’s complaint alleges that the defendant’s insurance company sent her text messages without her consent using an automatic telephone dialing system (autodialer). In response, the defendant argued that the software it used to send the text messages does not qualify as an autodialer because it calls numbers from a pre-set list, instead of one that is randomly or sequentially generated. The defendant further argued that the case should be stayed because the FCC is currently considering whether systems such as the one at issue qualify as autodialers under the TCPA following the D.C. Circuit’s March 2018 ruling in ACA International v. FCC, which set aside the FCC’s 2015 interpretation of an autodialer as “unreasonably expansive.” (Covered by a Buckley Special Alert.) The decision to refer the case to mediation comes after the court’s August 2018 order denying the defendant’s motion to stay the proceeding. In that order the court explained that, although the FCC issued a notice in May 2018 (covered by InfoBytes here) seeking comments on the interpretation of the TCPA, the rulemaking process would likely take years and may not even resolve the issue in the case.

    Courts TCPA Autodialer Mediation FCC Privacy/Cyber Risk & Data Security

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