Fifth Circuit District Court: Predictive Dialers are Outside the Scope of the TCPA

Out of the Northern District of Texas comes Adams v. Safe Home Security, Inc., a TCPA case that holds that predictive dialers are outside of the scope of the TCPA.

As covered by Nicole Su of Womble Bond Dickinson [https://www.tcpadefenseforce.com/tcpa-law-blog/district-court-in-the-fifth-circuit-holds-that-predictive-dialers-are-outside-the-scope-of-the-tcpa], the Court took a two-pronged approach to its analysis:

1) The Court believes that ACA Int'l v. FCC invalidated the 2015 Order, as well as the 2008 and 2003 orders, too. And with those three orders out of the way, the Court "independently interpret[ed] the statute to determine the scope of the definition of an ATDS and whether it applies to predictive dialers."

2) In reviewing the statutory definition of an ATDS, the Court determined that "an ATDS must both store and produce numbers that are randomly and sequentially generated and not merely store any numbers."

So the Court went all the way back to the FCC's 1992 order, which holds that the "TCPA did not apply to speed dialing or call forwarding 'because the numbers called are not generated in a random or sequential fashion.'"

"Notably," Su writes, "the Court expressly rejected the Ninth Circuit’s Marks decision – which held that an ATDS covers devices that called from a list of stored numbers."

Of additional interest in this case, the Court reviewed the TCPA's legislative history. In doing so, it agreed that the FCC's 1992 order allows businesses to call customers with whom they have "an established business relationship."

Per Su: "With the Adams case, we now have at least one district court in each of the eleven circuits addressing the definition of an ATDS after ACA Int’l in some form. It remains to be seen if any other Circuit Courts besides the Ninth Circuit will address this issue."