For several years, numerous businesses and industry groups have petitioned the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") to provide clarity to the Commission's prior interpretations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act ("TCPA"). Currently, the FCC is facing more than twenty (20) petitions asking the Commission to provide guidance and relief on many different topics, including the definition of an "autodialer," whether a consumer can revoke "prior express consent," and whether a business can be held liable for unknowingly placing calls to a cell phone that had ...
A federal court in Illinois recently denied a motion for class certification of a TCPA claim due to the predominance of individualized issues of proving whether the putative class members had consented to the defendant's phone calls. The case illustrates the point that defining a class to include only those debtors who had not provided their phone numbers to the original creditor in a transaction does not always eliminate the individualized nature of the issue of consent. In the case, Jamison v. First Credit Services, Inc., 2013 WL 1248306 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 28, 2013), the named plaintiff ...