Duane Morris TCPA Class Action Review – 2024

Courts granted class certification in 70% of TCPA cases in 2023, and denied it 30% of class certification motions. II. Significant Rulings In TCPA Class Actions 1. Rulings Granting Class Certification The plaintiff secured an early 2023 victory on a class certification motion in Williams, et al. v. PISA Group, Inc., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30768 (E.D. Penn. Feb. 24, 2023). In that case, the plaintiff filed a class action alleging that the defendant Pisa Group (PGI) violated the TCPA by calling her and numerous others at their residential phones despite their phone numbers being registered on the national Do Not Call Registry (DNC) and despite their not having an established business relationship with PGI. In turn, PGI admitted to calling Williams and seven other individuals in error thirty-seven times, and the plaintiff submitted an expert report suggesting that PGI may have improperly called as many as 30,373 residential telephone numbers that fell within the definition of Plaintiff ’ s proposed class. Id. at *2. The plaintiff filed a motion for class certification pursuant to Rule 23,

and the court granted the motion. First, as to the numerosity requirement, the court found that the plaintiff ’ s expert concluded that PGI called 4,997,966 unique telephone numbers that were on the DNC during the class period, and that the class was therefore sufficiently numerous. Id. at *18. As to the typicality requirement, the court noted that the plaintiff ’ s claims were identical to the claims of the proposed class members, since the plaintiff alleged that PGI uniformly violated all class members’ rights under the TCPA by calling the class member ’ s DNC-registered number more than once during a 12-month period. Id. at *21. The court determined that the plaintiff was an adequate class representative and that her counsel was sufficiently experienced in class litigation to meet the adequacy of representation requirement. Id. at *24. The court also stated that the plaintiff proved that her interests and incentives aligned with those of the class, and that there was strong similarity of legal theories between all members of the proposed class and that the class claims arose from the same practice or course of conduct on the part of PGI. Id. at *26-27. The court ruled that the plaintiff ’ s claims all fell upon the shared and easily identifiable issue of whether PGI made two or more calls to individuals within a 12-month timeframe while those numbers were registered on the DNC for more than thirty days. Id. at *29-30. Finally, the court concluded that a class action would be the superior method of adjudication because TCPA cases can involve hundreds of relatively small, factually-similar claims, the plaintiff submitted a workable method for assessing the claims of class members in an efficient manner, and no parties put forward evidence or argument suggesting that any of the Rule 23(b)(3)(A)-(D) factors weighed against class certification. Id. at *28. Accordingly, the court granted the plaintiff ’ s motion for class certification. In Douglas Phillip Brust, D.C., P.C., et al. v. Opensided MRI Of St. Louis LLC, 343 F.R.D. 581 (E.D. Mo. 2023), the plaintiffs, two professional corporations, filed a class action alleging that the defendant sent unsolicited faxes in violation of the TCPA. Specifically, the plaintiffs asserted that during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and at the height of the related shutdowns, the defendant sent faxes to

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