A ruling in a junk fax case alleging violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act may have wide-ranging implications for other companies defending against TCPA class-action lawsuits.
The ruling in the junk fax case relates back to a Supreme Court ruling from last year in the case of Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that California courts had no jurisdiction over non-residents of California related to a lawsuit over the drug Plavix. The non-residents were not prescribed Plavix while in California, did not ingest Plavix while in California, were not injured in the state, and Plavix was not made in California.
In the junk fax case, Practice Management v. Cirque Du Soleil, a judge in the Northern district of Illinois ultimately granted class certification, but, according to Mark Eisen, a lawyer with the law firm of Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff LLP, the court “evaluated whether the certified class could include out-of-state residents given that neither of the defendants were incorporated in or based in Illinois (one was incorporated in Quebec and headquartered in Montreal and the other was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Las Vegas). Jurisdiction was thus predicated solely on specific jurisdiction resulting from the fax transmission received by the plaintiff in Illinois. The Court concluded that it was compelled to dismiss the claims of non-Illinois class members, and thus re-defined the certified class to consist only of fax recipients who were Illinois residents.”
These rulings may force plaintiff’s lawyers to find multiple plaintiffs in every state, according to Eisen. With respect to consumer protection laws, like the TCPA and the Fair Credit Reporting Act, finding that many plaintiffs may prove to be too difficult and lead lawyers to restrict their cases to a single state.
From Eisen:
Perhaps the most significant effect, however, will be in cases that are currently pending. The Bristol-Myers decision is a fairly recent decision and its rationale is worth raising in currently pending cases in which the plaintiff is relying solely on specific jurisdiction. In cases pending for two, three, four years, it may be too late for a plaintiffs’ lawyer to track down a new plaintiff to sue in the defendant’s home forum. To that end, defendants may be able to limit the size and scope of the pending class action drastically without fear of a tag-along case popping up elsewhere.
