Be Careful what You Wish for

Kight v. Cashcall, Inc., No. D063363 (D4d1 Nov. 4, 2014)

This case is a class action alleging violations of California’s dual-consent telephone eavesdropping statute, Penal Code § 632. Three years ago, plaintiffs were successful in an appeal wherein the court adopted many if not all of their liability theories. Kight v. CashCall, Inc., 200 Cal. App. 4th 1377 (2011). As pertinent here, the prior appeal determined that § 632 applies whenever a caller has a reasonable expectation that a phone call will not be secretly monitored. The test is objective, but it accounts for the totality of the plaintiff’s circumstances.

On remand, Cashcall moved to decertify the class. It argued that the experiences of the plaintiffs in their calls with Cashcall were so varied in the extent of their expectations of monitoring that individual issues would necessarily predominate such that class treatment would be inappropriate.  The trial court agreed and decertified the class.

The court of appeal first notes that a decertification shouldn’t just be a redo of the original certification. Some circumstances relevant to management of the class must change before the court can consider decertifying. But the intervening appeal’s clarification of the relevant legal standard provided those circumstances here. And when that standard is considered, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in decertifying the class because individual issues did, in fact, predominate. The illustrative experiences of the individual plaintiffs showed such a wide variety of experiences and expectations that there would be no manageable way to afford class treatment.

Affirmed.