The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the dismissal of a Telephone Consumer Protection Act class-action lawsuit for lack of standing after a plaintiff alleged the defendant sent her a pre-recorded messaging using ringless voicemail.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Grigorian v. FCA US can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff received a pre-recorded ringless voicemail that was promoting the defendant’s new hybrid minivan. Nearly 90,000 other individuals also received the message. The plaintiff alleged that she and her other class members did not consent to receiving the pre-recorded messages. A District Court judge deemed the plaintiff did not suffer a concrete injury despite what might have been a technical violation of the statute and dismissed the case. The plaintiff appealed the ruling to the Eleventh Circuit.
The plaintiff argued that she had standing to sue because the time it took her to listen to the voicemail was time she did not spend studying for the Florida bar exam.
It’s at this point that you may need to be reminded that it was the Eleventh Circuit who ruled that the receipt of a single text message does not confer standing for a plaintiff to sue.
Ultimately, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the plaintiff did not meet the burden of proving that listening to a pre-recorded voicemail “rendered her phone unavailable to receive legitimate calls or messages for any period of time,” the Appeals Court wrote in affirming the dismissal.
The Appeals Court did mention in a footnote that the ruling might be different in a case if the plaintiff alleges that he or she received multiple ringless voicemails.
