In back-to-back decisions bound to have significant impact on Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) class action litigation, the Eleventh and Seventh Circuit Courts recently reached similar conclusions, narrowly holding that the TCPA’s definition of Automatic Telephone Dialing System (ATDS) only includes equipment that is capable of storing or producing numbers using a “random or sequential” number generator, excluding most “smartphone age” dialers. Each court expressly rejected the Ninth Circuit’s more expansive interpretation from a ruling in 2018, concluding that the TCPA covers any dialer that calls from a stored list of numbers “automatically”. These decisions are significant as most technologies in use today only dial numbers from predetermined lists of numbers.
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