United States: District Of Nevada Applies ACA Int'l V. FCC, Grants Summary Judgment In Favor Of Defendant On TCPA Claim

The District of Nevada recently applied the D.C. Circuit's decision in ACA International v. FCC and granted summary judgment in favor of the defendant on plaintiff's Telephone Consumer Protection Act claim. Specifically, the Court held in Marshall v. The CBE Group, Inc. that CBE's phone system does not qualify as an automatic telephone dialing system, commonly referred to as an "ATDS."

Plaintiff Gretta Marshall filed suit against CBE, a third-party debt collector, alleging that it violated the TCPA and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act through its collection efforts related to her outstanding bill. Marshall alleged that CBE's agents used an ATDS to contact her in violation of the TCPA. CBE places calls using a Manual Clicker Application ("MCA"), requiring the call agent to click a bullseye on a computer screen to place a call. When a CBE agent clicks the bullseye, a call is sent through a cloud-based connectivity pass-through, LiveVox, and then the CBE agent is connected with the person to whom the call is placed.

In analyzing CBE's "communication infrastructure," the Court stated that in light of the ACA v. FCC decision, it would apply the statutory language defining an ATDS, resulting in a focus on whether CBE's phone equipment has the capacity to produce or store phone numbers to be called using a random or sequential number generator. The Court noted that the overwhelming authority held that "point and click" dialing systems, used in unison with cloud-based pass-through services, did not qualify as ATDSs due to the human intervention required to place the call. Applying this rationale, the Court found that CBE agents who were required to click the bullseye were "integral to initiating outbound calls." This finding weighed in favor of finding that the MCA, used with LiveVox, was not an ATDS.

Further, the Court dismissed Marshall's allegations that LiveVox, the cloud-based pass-through, placed the calls and qualified as an ATDS. Marshall argued that because LiveVox could perform call progress analysis (such as maintaining call logs), it actually initiated the call, not CBE. Ultimately, the Court found that Marshall had not presented any evidence or legal authority sufficient to create a genuine dispute of material fact as to LiveVox's alleged qualification as an ATDS. Specifically, Marshall did not show that LiveVox's ability to track calling information meant that LiveVox has the capacity to produce or store telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator, and to dial the numbers.

Given the human intervention necessary to place calls using MCA and Marshall's failure to create a genuine dispute of material fact regarding LiveVox's role, the Court held that CBE did not use an ATDS to place calls to Marshall.

The District of Nevada is one of the first courts to apply the decision from ACA International v. FCC when interpreting the definition of an ATDS. The decision in Marshall v. CBE indicates that courts will be able to simplify their analysis of whether a telephone system qualifies as an ATDS under the TCPA by eliminating the need to determine "potential functionalities" of a calling system and instead focusing on the calling systems' "capacity to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator."

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