Discovery of Telephone Call Lists

On November 9, 2017, Magistrate Judge Maynard of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, ruled on a plaintiff's motion to compel the production of telephone call data held by the defendant in Median v. Enhanced Recovery Co., No. 15-14342-civ, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 186651 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 9, 2017). The motion also requested documentation on policies and training, and information about prior customer complaints and lawsuits.

ERC uses automatic telephone dialing systems ("ATDS")to help with the collection of debts. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act prohibits calls to cell phones made without an owner's consent. Judge Maynard held that production of outbound call lists are allowed in TCPA actions order in order to help establish class action requirements and to prove the plaintiffs' claims. Productions can include call data from systems when there is a dispute about their status as ATDS systems. The court also ruled that data on calls made to parties other than the named plaintiffs was discoverable for the purposes of bringing a class action.

Judge Maynard did agree with the defendants that data on calls made to landlines are overboard and not permitted in TCPA actions.

With respect to producing data on millions of calls, the court specifically noted that, “the burden of producing this material is mitigated, however, by the fact that ERC can likely do this via spreadsheet or .csv ready data files.”

Prior complaints were also deemed discoverable because they could be used to identify class members and not overly burdensome because ERC was under an order in another case to show its compliance with the TCPA.