/>iOne of the basis principals of a lawsuit, which many plaintiffs seem to forget, is that the defendant being sued must be liable for the conduct alleged in the lawsuit. For instance, when claiming damages for prerecorded calls made without consent, a plaintiff must sufficiently allege that it is the defendant who made the calls in the first place. Another court has now held that a plaintiff has failed to satisfy this basic legal requirement.
In Lightfoot v. SelectQuote, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-04673, 2025 WL 154795 (N.D. Il. Jun. 2, 2025), the Court granted SelectQuote’s motion to dismiss the plaintiff’s claim because the plaintiff had not linked the alleged activity with SelectQuote. The plaintiff claimed that the calls in question featured the following prerecorded message:
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Ashley, your health center representative. How are you doing today? I’m calling because the updated plans for Medicare have just been released, and it may give you some better access to things like dental, vision, hearing, and over-the-counter benefits. Now, these benefits aren’t automatically given, so we are calling to make sure that you actually are given everything you may be entitled to. There’s also an additional benefit, which you may qualify to get up to $148 a month. That is cash back to your Social Security, depending on your income. Now, I believe you do have Medicare Part A and B, correct? That’s awesome. Okay, this is all the information that I need for my site to check your eligibility, and it does look like you qualify, I’m going to go ahead and get started. Thank you.
Notably missing from the above message? The defendant’s name. According to the Lightfoot plaintiff’s allegations, the received calls all followed the same or a substantially similar script. Thus, SelectQuote was not identified as the caller in any of the messages.
Of course, where a plaintiff can actually allege that the defendant made the call in question, the caller usually identifies themselves as the defendant. Or at least there is call-back number providing this link to the defendant. The Lightfoot plaintiff could not allege any of these facts.
Instead, the plaintiff oddly pointed to other lawsuits against SelectQuote to somehow argue that SelectQuote made the calls at issue in their own case. That is not how the law works. Plaintiffs cannot get around the basic tenet of a lawsuit by pointing to other lawsuits, with entirely different fact patterns, where the calls might have actually been made by the defendant.
Sometimes, a plaintiff can get around the requirement that the defendant needs to have made the calls in question by arguing that the defendant is vicariously liable for those calls. This requires showing that the defendant had some type of authority, or ratified, the alleged calls. Although the Lightfoot plaintiff claimed to proceed on a theory of vicarious liability, the plaintiff did not make any of these allegations. Outside the conclusory claim that SelectQuote called plaintiff, which the court properly did not consider, the plaintiff did not make any allegations as to the defendant’s liability for the purported calls.
Fortunately for SelectQuote, the Lightfoot court did not agree with any of the plaintiff’s reasoning. The court dismissed the plaintiff’s claims, finding that there was no link between plaintiff’s claims and the calls at issue.
