As the Baron reported a few weeks back, the Eastern District of Michigan handed us a great case on ATDS functionality. Keyes v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, No. 17-cv-11492, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 138445, at *15 (E.D. Mich. Aug. 16, 2018).

In Keyes, the court held that ACA Int’l set aside the FCC’s rulings regarding “the functions an autodialer must be able to perform, namely its interpretation of whether a device needed to be able to generate and call random or sequential numbers to constitute an ATDS.” As such, it determined that ACA Int’l vacated the FCC’s definition of the functions necessary for a device to constitute an ATDS. The court went on to conclude that Defendant’s Aspect system did not possess the functions necessary to qualify as an ATDS because the system dialed from a set list, which “is not the same as dialing numbers using a random or sequential number generator.”

However, since this is TCPAland after all, good news only lasts so long. This week, the Plaintiff appealed the district court’s decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. They really wasted no time in doing so since the deadline to seek appellate review is still weeks away.

Keyes represents a major appellate case as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal has not yet been asked to weigh in on the TCPA’s definition of ATDS.