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District Court rejects motion to dismiss robocall claims, says predictive dialer is autodialer

Courts Robocalls TCPA Autodialer ACA International

Courts

On October 30, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin denied a company’s motion to dismiss allegations that it violated the TCPA when it used a predictive dialer to try to collect a debt from the plaintiff. According to the opinion, the plaintiff alleged the company called him repeatedly without permission in an attempt to collect a debt using a predictive dialer. The company moved to dismiss because the plaintiff did not allege that the company used an autodialer with the ability to dial random or sequential phone numbers, which the company argued was required by the TCPA. The court found that a predictive dialer is an autodialer under the TCPA even if it does not generate random or sequential numbers. This conclusion was based on a 2003 FCC ruling, which stated that predictive dialers are autodialers “even if the device does not dial random or sequentially generated numbers.” The court further noted that the decision reached by the D.C. Circuit in ACA International v. FCC—which set aside the FCC’s 2015 interpretation of an autodialer as unreasonably expansive—did not invalidate the FCC’s 2003 order. (See previous Buckley Sandler Special Alert on ACA International here.) Based on this analysis, the court concluded that the plaintiff had established the three elements necessary to allege a TCPA violation.