TCPA Violation

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Ali Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, Inc.,

Case No.: 19-1738

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and KANNE and BARRETT, Circuit Judges.

Focus: TCPA Violation

The wording of the provision that we interpret today is enough to make a grammarian throw down her pen. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act bars certain uses of an “automatic telephone dialing system,” which it defines as equipment with the capacity “to store or produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or sequential number generator,” as well as the capacity to dial those numbers. We must decide an issue that has split the circuits: what the phrase “using a random or sequential number generator” modifies.

We’ll save the intense grammatical parsing for the body of the opinion—here, we’ll just give the punchline. We hold that “using a random or sequential number generator” modifies both “store” and “produce.” The system at issue in this case, AT&T’s “Customer Rules Feedback Tool,” neither stores nor produces numbers using a random or sequential number generator; instead, it exclusively dials numbers stored in a customer database. Thus, it is not an “automatic telephone dialing system” as defined by the Act—which means that AT&T did not violate the Act when it sent unwanted automated text messages to Ali Gadelhak.

Affirmed

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Derek A Hawkins is trademark corporate counsel for Harley-Davidson. Hawkins oversees the prosecution and maintenance of the Harley-Davidson’s international trademark portfolio in emerging markets.