Williams v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, 8:24-cv-00033

Plaintiffs moved to reopen discovery after Facebook v. Duguid to test whether Defendant’s Avaya predictive dialer and related systems qualify as an ATDS under the Supreme Court’s discussion in footnote 7.
The Court previously permitted limited discovery from an Avaya representative and set a July 26, 2021 deadline; Plaintiffs then sought broader discovery (including defendant source code and a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition) and 120 days to complete it.
Avaya and Defendant opposed; a separate motion to quash by Avaya was denied by Magistrate Judge Skomal.
Defendant opposed reopening discovery, arguing Plaintiffs were not diligent and that the requested discovery is futile because courts have rejected Plaintiffs’ reading of Facebook’s footnote 7.
The Court analyzed district-court decisions interpreting Facebook and concluded Plaintiffs’ theory (that a system becomes an ATDS merely because it uses a random/sequential generator to store or order calls from a preproduced list) is legally unsupported and the requested discovery would be futile.
The Court denied Plaintiffs’ application to conduct additional discovery.

Issue	Plaintiff's Argument	Defendant's Argument	Held
Whether Facebook’s footnote 7 supports an ATDS theory where a system uses a random/sequential generator only to store numbers or to determine calling order from a preproduced list	Footnote 7 permits ATDS liability if a device uses a random/sequential generator to store numbers or to determine the order of calling from a stored list	Facebook construes “using a random or sequential number generator” as describing how numbers are produced or stored—courts have read footnote 7 to mean the preproduced list itself must have been created by a random/sequential generator; Plaintiffs’ broader reading is rejected	Denied: court adopts the view that Facebook’s footnote 7 does not expand liability to systems that merely order or store numbers from a non-random, non-sequentially generated list; Plaintiffs’ theory is legally unsupported (futile)
Whether Plaintiffs showed good cause and diligence to reopen discovery (including source code review)	Plaintiffs say discovery of source code is necessary to determine whether Defendant’s system stores numbers generated randomly/sequentially and that they pursued discovery diligently	Defendant contends Plaintiffs were not diligent and that reopening discovery would be futile given the law rejecting Plaintiffs’ theory	Denied: because the requested discovery would be futile under the court’s legal conclusion, Plaintiffs fail to show good cause; court does not reach other arguments

Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 141 S. Ct. 1163 (2021) (Supreme Court held an ATDS requires capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator; footnote 7 contains illustrative example but does not support expanding liability to systems that merely store or randomly order numbers from lists generated non-randomly)