Fake Ring Tone Plaintiffs Say They Met Their Damage Disclosure Obligations

T-Mobile’s June 5 motion to compel damages information from fake ring tones plaintiffs Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone (see 2306060018) fails to show they’re required “to supplement their damages disclosures with exact damages methodologies right now,” said the plaintiffs’ response Wednesday (docket 1:19-cv-07190) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago. “Under the standard applicable to complex class actions such as this case,” the plaintiffs need provide only “the general theory of damages and the components that may reasonably make up that general theory to the extent available to them,” they said. The plaintiffs are entitled to defer disclosing their exact methodologies for calculating aggregated class-wide damages that depend on expert testimony, they said. That will be based on analysis of samplings of “voluminous” call detail records and other complex technical evidence, until they produce their expert disclosures, they said. The plaintiffs’ initial damages disclosures satisfy their “current obligations,” they said. The plaintiffs also have disclosed “detailed information about the types of business disruption and mitigation costs at issue,” including information about the economic burdens "foisted upon them" and their employees “involved in responding to rural call completion complaints,” they said. Craigville and Consolidated allege T-Mobile used the fake ring tones to mask its intermediate carriers’ routine failure to deliver high-cost calls routed to rural areas of the U.S. They allege the fake ring tones deceived customers into believing the calls were reaching their intended destinations and thereby shifted blame for those call failures onto local phone companies, especially rural carriers, even though the calls never made it to the rural carriers’ networks. They allege T-Mobile’s fake ring tone scheme injured their businesses and those of similarly situated rural carrier networks in multiple ways.