LAWRENCE S. BRODSKY, individually and on behalf of others similarly situated, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HUMANADENTAL INSURANCE CO. d/b/a HUMANA SPECIALTY BENEFITS, Defendant-Appellee. ALPHA TECH PET, INC., et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. ESSENDANT CO., ESSENDANT INC., and ESSENDANT MANAGEMENT SERVICES LLC, Defendants-Appellees.
No. 17-3067 & No. 17-3506
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
Argued April 10, 2018 — Decided December 3, 2018
Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and FLAUM and KANNE, Circuit Judges.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 10 C 3233 — John Robert Blakey, Judge. Nos. 16 C 513 & 16 C 4321 — Thomas M. Durkin, Judge.
WOOD,
I
A. Brodsky
We can be brief with the underlying facts of both cases. Plaintiff Brodsky is an
On May 14, 2008, Brodsky‘s 0152 machine received two identical one-page faxes (“the subject faxes“). The pages indicated that they were sent by “Humana Specialty Benefits.” These faxes were created by Humana‘s marketing department. They did not identify the person or entity to which they were directed. And, to complicate matters, the 0152 machine was not used exclusively by Brodsky; seven other insurance agents had permission to, and did, use it during the relevant time. The parties agreed that faxes identical to the subject faxes were successfully transmitted 19,931 times. Brodsky responded with his lawsuit against Humana.
B. Alpha Tech Pet
The facts in this case are similar. Defendant Essendant and its affiliates are national distributors of office products, janitorial and sanitation supplies, breakroom supplies, technology products, industrial supplies, and automotive aftermarket tools and equipment. Alpha Tech alleged that the defendants transmitted unsolicited faxes, including eight advertisements that were sent between January 16, 2012, and April 26, 2012, to it and the other class members. The unwanted faxes advertised commercial products available from LaGasse, LLC, which at the time was a wholly owned subsidiary of United Stationers. United Stationers changed its name to Essendant Inc. in June 2015, and at the same time LaGasse LLC merged with Essendant Co.; Essendant Management Services LLC also allegedly played some role in the fax transmissions. We refer in this opinion to Essendant, the current name, for simplicity. The different roles each entity played are not material for our purposes.
According to Alpha Tech, the faxes that Essendant sent to it violated the TCPA and the Solicited Fax Rule because they did not include the required opt-out language. It sought to represent a class of all persons who received advertising faxes sent by Essendant or any of its affiliates or predecessors from May 1, 2011, to May 1, 2015. This was a huge proposed class: defendants estimate that it swept in approximately 1.5 million faxes, in 725 separate transmissions, to nearly 24,000 unique fax numbers.
II
The Brodsky case began in Illinois state court as a putative class action raising claims under the TCPA, but it was removed to the federal court. After removal, Humana answered and raised the affirmative defenses of pre-existing business relationship and consent. It pointed to the contractual language mentioned above in support of both defenses. Its marketing department created the faxes that Brodsky and other putative class members received. At the bottom of the page of each fax, in fine print, it said “If you don‘t want us to contact you by fax, please call 1-800-U-CAN-ASK.”
The Alpha Tech case, which was handled by a different district court judge, is actually two cases: one that was filed in the Northern District of Illinois on January 14, 2016, and the other (Craftwood II, Inc. v. Essendant, Inc.) that was initiated in the Circuit Court of Lake County, Illinois, on March 4, 2016, and later removed to the Northern District of Illinois and consolidated with Alpha Tech. Essendant tried to eliminate the class allegations with a motion to dismiss or strike, filed on March 28, 2016, but the district court denied that motion. About a year later, before anything else of consequence had occurred, the D. C. Circuit issued its decision in Bais Yaakov. On July 27, 2017, largely relying on Bais Yaakov, Essendant filed a preemptive motion to deny class certification. Alpha Tech responded with a motion for certification of three classes, covering 545 of the 725 fax templates Essendant had used. Nearly all of those faxes contained the following opt-out notice: “If you have received this fax in error, please accept our apologies and call toll free 877-385-4440 to be removed from our list.” Alpha Tech criticized this notice on three grounds: (1) failure to provide a fax number for opt-out requests; (2) failure to state that it is unlawful for the sender not to respond within a reasonable time; and (3) failure to state that the recipient must identify the fax number to which the request relates. All these requirements appear in the Solicited Fax Rule.
The district court issued an order denying class certification on November 3, 2017. It ruled that this court‘s decision in Holtzman v. Turza, 728 F.3d 682 (7th Cir. 2013), holding that the TCPA requires a compliant opt-out notice before a consent-based defense can prevail, did not apply to this situation. Instead, it agreed with the D.C. Circuit‘s ruling in Bais Yaakov striking down the Solicited Fax Rule, alternately calling that decision “binding” or at least “persuasive.” In a footnote, it found additional support for its ruling in the waiver that the FCC by then had granted to the defendants. Last, with the regulation out of the picture, it found that individual questions predominated and thus that class treatment was inappropriate. Alpha Tech sought interlocutory review of that decision, and we agreed to take the case.
III
Because it sits at center stage in these controversies, we begin by setting out the critical parts of the Solicited Fax Rule:
(a) No person or entity may:
... (4) Use a telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine, unless—
(i) The unsolicited advertisement is from a sender with an established business relationship ... with the recipient; and
(ii) The sender obtained the number of the telephone facsimile machine through—
(A) The voluntary communication of such number by the recipient directly to the sender, within the context of such established business relationship; ...
(iii) The advertisement contains a notice that informs the recipient of the ability and means to avoid future unsolicited advertisements. A notice contained in an advertisement complies with the requirements under this paragraph only if [certain criteria are met].
...
(iv) A facsimile advertisement that is sent to a recipient that has provided prior express invitation or permission to the sender must include an opt-out notice that complies with the requirements in paragraph (a)(4)(iii) of this section.
The parties have engaged in a lengthy debate over the question whether Bais Yaakov is formally binding on this court, or if our obligation is only to give it that respectful consideration we would accord to any of our sister circuits’ decisions. The problem arises from the Hobbs Act, which gives the courts of appeals exclusive jurisdiction to review FCC orders,
We hold that the FCC‘s 2006 Solicited Fax Rule is unlawful to the extent that it requires opt-out notices on solicited faxes. The FCC‘s Order in this case interpreted and applied that 2006 Rule. We vacate that Order and remand for further proceedings.
852 F.3d at 1083 (emphasis added). A possible reading of this paragraph, however, is as a statement that the court‘s ruling extended only to the 2014 Anda Order. The petition for review of that order was filed long after the deadline for challenging the 2006 Order, which imposed the Solicited Fax Rule. The question is thus what to make of the court‘s statement that the 2006 rule itself is unlawful. Is it dictum, or does it have binding force as a ruling
If our decision turned on the ultimate binding impact of the D.C. Circuit‘s decision with respect to the 2006 Order, we would pursue this matter further. But it does not, and thus we do not need to decide whether we would read Bais Yaakov as broadly as our sister circuits have done. There is no doubt that the D.C. Circuit vacated the order before it (i.e. the 2014 Anda Order) and held that the 2014 application of the 2006 Order was unlawful. In the end, therefore, this was an “as applied” decision, not an untimely attack on the 2006 Order. We can therefore assume that the 2006 Order is still in effect (though drained of a great deal of force, it seems), but that it must be construed consistently with the D.C. Circuit‘s decision on the 2014 Order, because that decision is binding on all courts of appeals through the Hobbs Act. And the question in our case is even narrower, because we are not reviewing the merits of either order. Instead, we must determine only whether, against the backdrop of these orders, the district courts here abused their discretion in finding class treatment inappropriate.
In answering that question, we start with the language of the TCPA. As amended by the Junk Fax Act, the TCPA prohibits the use of “any telephone facsimile machine ... to send, to a telephone facsimile machine, an unsolicited advertisement.”
As we noted earlier, in 2006 the FCC decided to issue a new rule related to the third of those requirements—the opt-out notice. See Rules and Regulations Implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991; Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005, 71 Fed. Reg. 25,967, 25,971–72 (May 3, 2006) (now codified at
For purposes of the class certification decision, this history tells us that the legality of the defendants’ actions may end up depending on whether the fax was sent with permission (legal) or not (illegal), and it may also turn on the adequacy of the opt-out notices on the faxes in question. The consequences for a firm that violates the TCPA can be dire when it is facing not just a single aggrieved person, but a class. The statute provides a private right of action to collect either actual damages or $500 per violation in statutory damages. See
We agree with the D.C. Circuit (and the Sixth and Ninth) that, at a minimum, it is necessary to distinguish between faxes sent with permission of the recipient and those that are truly unsolicited. The question of what suffices for consent is central, and it is likely to vary from recipient to recipient (or so the district court reasonably could have concluded). Cf. Blow v. Bijora, Inc., 855 F.3d 793, 804–06 (7th Cir. 2017) (excluding from summary judgment potential class members “who provided no consent at all or whose consent was more limited“). Brodsky admits that he had a market agreement, and thus a pre-existing business relationship, with Humana, and that he expressly agreed in his market agreement that Humana could communicate with him by fax. Humana did so, and it even added a telephone number Brodsky could use if he wanted to stop receiving those faxes. But even if, as Brodsky has argued, this agreement somehow fails to establish his consent, we do not know what kind of pre-existing arrangement may have existed between Humana and the other fax recipients that Brodsky wants to represent. These are the hallmarks of an issue that requires individual scrutiny. See Howland v. First Am. Title Ins. Co., 672 F.3d 525, 534 (7th Cir. 2012) (holding that a “transaction-specific inquiry prevents class treatment“).
We must also take into account the fact that the FCC granted retroactive waivers of compliance with the Solicited Fax Rule for both sets of defendants.1 The waivers cover faxes sent before April 30, 2015. See In re Rules and Regulations Implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, 31 FCC Rcd. 11943 (2016) (Humana Order); In re Rules and Regulations Implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, 30 FCC Rcd. 8598, 8613 (2015) (United Stationers Order). While the legal underpinnings of these orders were called into doubt by the D.C. Circuit‘s vacation of the Anda Order,
The final questions are whether the waivers have any effect on the availability of a private right of action and whether that issue is better handled through individual litigation or a class. The TCPA allows a “person or entity” to bring “an action based on a violation of this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection” for injunctive relief, actual damages, or statutory damages.
As a regulatory matter, the Solicited Fax Rule is subject to the general rule regarding “suspension, amendment, or waiver of rules.” See
IV
We do not rule out the possibility that some of the recipients of Humana‘s or Essendant‘s faxes were the victims of the practices prohibited by the TCPA as amended. Some may not have had pre-existing contractual arrangements, some may not have signaled their consent to receiving faxes, and some senders of faxes may not have received waivers of the Solicited Fax Rule from the FCC or the waivers might be flawed. We thus express no opinion on the ability of individual plaintiffs to go forward with these suits. We hold only that neither of the district courts in these cases abused its discretion when it concluded that the criteria for a class action under
We therefore AFFIRM the orders of the district courts in both Case No. 17-3067 and in Case No. 17-3506, denying class certification.