Good morning TCPAWorld — Queenie here.
So one of the Czar’s most famous — and one of my favorite wins was in Stoops v. Wells Fargo from back in 2016.
In that case the named Plaintiff had collected 85 cell phones she purchased specifically to collect wrong number telephone calls intended for debtors. She would then turn around and sue the callers—sometimes pausing to request calls stop before she did so and sometimes simply hitting them out of left field. At deposition she admitted this was her “business” and she had bought the phones for that purpose. The Czar successfully earned summary judgment in the case in favor of Wells Fargo creating an entirely new body of case law—a TCPA defendant that took steps to create the calls at issue lacks standing to pursue the case. This was an important win because “manufactured” TCPA lawsuits are—as they were then—very common given the huge $500.00 per call statutory damages available under the statute. And given the prevailing anti-robocall public sentiment individuals can abuse the justice system, set up a lawsuit, extort a small business and be viewed as the “good guy” in many courtrooms.
With his win in Stoops, the Czar believed he had handed the world a tool for dealing with manufactured lawsuits and contemplated other lawyers would be able to walk in his lofty footsteps and bring home similar results for their clients.
This might be the only time the Czar has ever been wrong in one of his predictions.
It turns out common defense lawyers simply weren’t capable of expanding on the doctrine he had created and, to the contrary, began misusing Stoops in an effort to ban repeat litigators from bringing suit as opposed to manufactured lawsuits. These are two different things. A person might legitimately have several TCPA claims against a single or multiple companies. But that does not mean they took steps to create the lawsuit.
As other attorneys and defendants misused Stoops case after case watered down the impact of the decision and soon Stoops became a rarely-followed footnote in a body of law that overwhelmingly tolerated repeat and even seemingly manufactured TCPA suits by questionable plaintiffs.
Jeremy Jackson v. KWU Co. 2024 WL 4279504 (M.D. Pa Sept. 24, 2024) is the latest example of a TCPA defendant just flat misapplying Stoops and damaging its application as a result.
In Jackson the plaintiff allegedly purchased goods from a telemarketer allegedly to determine who had made the calls at issue. The Plaintiff was charged by the defendant, who he then sued as the supposed TCPA violator.
The defendant moved to dismiss arguing: i) the Plaintiff purchased the product at issue and, therefore, lacked standing under Stoops; and ii) as it did not actually make the calls the caller, Walkin Global LLP, should have been named.
The Court had little trouble finding Stoops inapplicable to this case. Here the Plaintiff received phone calls and purchased goods to determine who the calls came from. He took no steps to create the phone calls in the first place. And the fact that he had brought other TCPA lawsuits as an attorney did not mean he was not otherwise harmed by the unwanted calls. So this case was nothing like Stoops where the consumer intentionally sought out the calls.
The Court also rejected Defendant’s necessary party argument finding that discovery was needed to determine who the caller was. Notably Troutman Amin, LLP has recently earned a motion to dismiss on standing grounds in similar circumstances—leveraging the “fairly traceable” prong of the standing analysis to its client’s favor.
So the Czar and team continue to win where others feel the cold chill of an early winter’s defeat. They had the “wrong man” indeed. So it goes.
For those of you interested in catching the me on the road—and you all are, of course—I will be speaking at ITC in Las Vegas, NV next Wednesday. Hope to see you all there.
xoxo
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