School Urges Miami Court to Throw Out All of Plaintiff’s FTSA Claims

Defendant Keiser University seeks the denial of plaintiff Maria Fernanda Soto Leigue’s Feb. 14 motion to sever her claims that it violated the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act by sending her unwanted autodialed text messages and remand them to state court, said the school’s opposition Tuesday (docket 1:22-cv-22307) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Miami. The plaintiff wants to keep in federal court her claims Keiser violated the FTSA by contacting individuals whose numbers were on the national do not call registry. Her motion argued several courts in Florida’s Southern and Middle districts recently said there's no Article III standing for claims involving autodialed text message violations under the FTSA, as she alleges against Keiser. If the court agrees she lacks standing to assert the text-messaging claims, then it should either dismiss or remand all the claims in her complaint “in their entirety,” said the school. The motion is “an obvious attempt at claims-based forum shopping,” Keiser said. The plaintiff would like the court to think that, even though she concedes lack of concrete harm for the autodialer claim, she still alleges an “injury-in-fact” for the DNC claim, said the school. She fails to explain how the court “can exercise subject-matter jurisdiction over the DNC claim but not the autodialer claim -- where both claims arose out the same facts” and, according to her complaint, “yielded the same harm,” it said.