Typicality, Adequacy, And The Motion To Deny - Labou v. Cellco Partnership

In Labou v. Cellco Partnership, No. 2:13-cv-00844-MCE-EFB, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26974 (E.D. Cal. Mar. 3, 2014), the named plaintiff sued cell phone company Verizon. She alleged that Verizon had used an automatic dialer to call her cell phone in an attempt to get her former brother-in-law to pay his cell phone bill, a practice that allegedly violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). And she sought to certify a class of everyone else Verizon had contacted with an automatic dialer.

There was a twist: the TCPA does not prohibit collection calls so long as the recipient is not being charged. Verizon did not charge its customers for these auto-dialed calls, so the only people actually harmed were those very few--like Ms. Labou--who were not Verizon customers but were contacted anyway.