Tuesday, December 29, 2020
A recent denial of a professional plaintiff’s motion for class certification shows that, irrespective of whether such plaintiffs have standing to sue on their own behalf, courts are increasingly skeptical that contrived claims are amenable to class treatment.
See Hirsch v. USHealth Advisors, LLC, No. 4:18-CV-00245-P, 2020 WL 7186380, at *1 (N.D. Tex. Dec. 7, 2020).
The Facts
The plaintiff in this case, Aaron Hirsch, was a real estate agent who used his cell phone for both business and personal use. He had listed his cell phone number on the national Do-Not-Call Registry, but also advertised his business using his cell phone number and even took partial tax deductions for his cell phone. Eventually, Hirsch and his friend Max Maccoby, a lawyer, developed a plan to profit through the TCPA. Hirsch would log any telemarketing calls that he received, and Maccoby would review the log for potential TCPA litigation. Through this scheme, Hirsch learned to feign interest to elicit additional calls from the caller or the company on whose behalf the caller was allegedly calling.