American Home Services, Inc.v.A Fast Sign Co
A Fast Sign Company brought a class action alleging that American Home Services violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending unsolicited fax advertisements. The trial court found that AHS had sent about 306,000 faxes and entered a $459 million judgment based on $1,500 for each willful or knowing violation. After earlier appellate proceedings and a Georgia Supreme Court ruling that liability extends to faxes a sender attempts to send, the Court of Appeals addressed the remaining issues. It held that evidence supported the number of faxes and that any error involving an alleged admission or an inference from deleted fax logs was harmless. Under the TCPA, a sender acts willfully or knowingly when it knows it is sending the faxes; it need not know that the conduct violates the statute. AHS also bore the burden of proving an established-business relationship defense. The court nevertheless vacated the judgment because it did not exclude recipients outside the certified class or describe the class as required by Georgia’s class-action statute. It remanded for those exclusions and a corrected judgment, while rejecting the claim that the distribution formula created an impermissible statutory windfall.
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