11th Circuit Vacates and Remands TCPA Case Over Standing
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s dismissal of a TCPA case and remanded it over the question of whether a single phone call is a concrete injury that gives a plaintiff…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
standing, said the panel's opinion Tuesday (docket 21-14045). “Once the standing issue is resolved, the district court may then reissue its decision (or rule otherwise as it seems fit), and an appeal may again follow,” said the opinion from Circuit Judges Elizabeth Branch and Britt Grant, and U.S. District Judge Harvey Schlesinger. The case concerns multiple calls to the individual plaintiffs from a dialing system owned by Ocwen Loan Servicing, and was dismissed by the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida after the lower court concluded Ocwen’s system wasn’t an automated dialing system under the TCPA. The plaintiffs appealed, but their complaint doesn’t specify how many calls the plaintiffs received. That’s important because prior 11th circuit decisions said more than one call is sufficient to confer standing, but not whether a single call is enough, the opinion said. “For any of these plaintiffs, the ‘exact number of calls’ they received could be zero, one, or more than one,” said the opinion. “Each of these scenarios would potentially present a different resolution to the standing issue.”