Class certification granted in TCPA suit against satellite provider
On August 1, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia granted a plaintiff’s motion for class certification in an action against a satellite TV company (defendant) for allegedly placing unwanted telemarketing robocalls. According to the order, the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant retained a communications company to sell the defendant’s services and that the communications company purchased a list of leads and phone numbers from a third party to make telemarketing calls. According to the plaintiffs, the communications company failed to scrub the list for numbers on the national do-not-call list and called those numbers in violation of the TCPA. The district court noted that “[t]here are two overriding questions in this case: (1) whether [the communications company] contacted class members listed on the do-not-call registry; and (2) whether [the defendant] is liable for [the communication company’s] actions.” The district court further noted that “[a]ny individual issues or defenses are limited and easily resolved with aggregate data from defendant [].” In agreeing with the “plaintiffs’ contention that this is a ‘model case for the application of the class action mechanism,’” the district court certified a nationwide class of nearly 114,000 individuals whose telephone numbers were listed on the do-not-call list and who received more than one telemarketing call within any 12-month period at any time from the communications company to promote the defendant.