The plaintiff in Gadelhak v. AT&T Services, Inc., has appealed U.S. District Judge Edmond E. Chang's ruling in AT&T's favor, which held that texts sent using software that did not "randomly or sequentially" choose numbers, but instead dialed from a pre-selected list, did not qualify as an automated telephone dialing system, or "ATDS," under the TCPA.
The case involved AT&T's practice of creating lists of affiliate customer telephone numbers used to send out surveys and promotions. The plaintiff alleged that he had received several Spanish language texts from AT&T even though he was not a customer, did not speak Spanish, and his number was on the National Do Not Call List. Judge Chang examined the meaning of the term ATDS in light of the invalidation of the FCC's 2015 Declaratory Ruling, which the D.C. Circuit found adopted two irreconcilable definitions of the term ATDS. In the absence of binding authority, the Court found that "the numbers stored by an ATDS must have been generated using a random of sequential number generator" to fall within the statutory definition.