AT&T and T-Mobile each met its obligation to serve initial discovery disclosures on the other in AT&T’s false advertising complaint against its competitor, they said in separate notices Monday and Tuesday (docket 4:22-cv-00760) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Sherman. The document exchanges took place Monday, said both notices. AT&T alleges in its complaint that each of the claims in T-Mobile’s BannedSeniors.com campaign is "literally false" when T-Mobile asserts that 92% of U.S. seniors can't get an AT&T discount because they live outside Florida (see 2211130002). T-Mobile moved Sept. 16 to dismiss the case for lack of personal jurisdiction on grounds that AT&T's claims do not belong in a Texas court.

AT&T needs another four-week deadline extension to Dec. 16 to answer the Sept. 19 Communications Workers of America complaint to compel arbitration for DirecTV employees who CWA alleges were “unjustly” terminated after AT&T’s DirecTV spinoff (see 2210090002), said AT&T's unopposed motion Tuesday (docket 1:22-cv-00954) at the U.S. District Court for Western Texas in Austin. AT&T and the CWA “are actively engaged in ongoing negotiations for the resolution of this matter,” said the motion. “Additional time is needed and warranted so that the parties may focus on achieving a settlement and have sufficient time to fully exhaust those settlement efforts, which would moot the need for any responsive pleading."

T-Mobile and its former Director-Sales Heidi Cramer agreed to extend by 21 days, to Dec. 19, the company’s deadline extension for answering Cramer’s sex discrimination complaint against the carrier, said a stipulation Monday (docket 2:22-cv-03800) in U.S. District Court for Southern Ohio in Columbus. Cramer alleges two top former T-Mobile sales executives engaged in a scheme of artificially inflating sales to small- and medium-business customers, and that she was terminated when the plan went awry (see 2210260038). T-Mobile assigned her “sole blame” for the wrongful actions of her male co-workers in the sales department, alleged her complaint.

AT&T wants a federal court to prevent Lumen from disconnecting circuits used to provide services to wireless and wireline customers, said a reply brief last week in support of a preliminary injunction filed in docket 1:22-cv-02206-RM-KLM in U.S. District Court in Colorado. The proceeding stems from a complaint filed by Lumen in August over unpaid time division multiplexing fees. “Lumen’s threatened disconnection would cause catastrophic harm to AT&T and its affected customers,” said AT&T’s motion. AT&T has argued that Lumen is seeking to raise the fees by 20%, while Lumen has argued that AT&T was previously seeing a discounted rate, and that the increased prices are consistent with the market price. “Even if AT&T pays the amounts Lumen demands now, Lumen will threaten disconnection again unless AT&T keeps paying Lumen at the rates it demands while this case proceeds,” AT&T said. “AT&T would be irreparably harmed by this massive out-of-pocket cost.” Along with the injunction, AT&T is also seeking to have the case transferred to the Southern District of New York, and the motion says the court should rule on the transfer motion first, because Lumen has agreed not to disconnect any circuits until the Colorado court or a court in the Southern District of New York have ruled on the preliminary injunction. Lumen previously planned to disconnect the circuits Dec. 5, the transfer motion said. Lumen opposes the transfer motion, and has argued that its agreements with AT&T mean the case doesn’t have to be transferred.

The U.S. District Court for Arizona intends to clarify its Oct. 7 order denying Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward’s request for an injunction to bar enforcement of the House Jan. 6 Committee’s subpoena for Ward’s phone records, said T-Mobile in its request Monday (docket 22-16473) for limited remand at the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Remand to U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa in Phoenix and her clarification are necessary to confirm that the scope of the committee’s subpoena on T-Mobile “has not been narrowed to exclude records” involving the phone numbers associated with Ward’s medical patients, said the request. Remand and clarification will “ensure that the district court record correctly reflects the active scope” of the subpoena, it said. Monday’s Supreme Court denial of Ward’s application to block enforcement of the subpoena (see 2211140039) was her fourth such setback since Sept. 22, following two denials by Humetewa and one by the 9th Circuit. Ward argued unsuccessfully each time to quash the subpoena on constitutional grounds and to protect doctor-patient privilege. The committee says its investigators need access to Ward's phone records to probe her efforts to disrupt certification of the 2020 election.

T-Mobile removed to the U.S. District Court for Southern New York on Monday a petition (docket 1:22-cv-09710) from a group calling itself 100 Consumers to compel T-Mobile to submit to binding arbitration before the American Arbitration Association over the August 2021 data breach that affected 83 million T-Mobile customers. The petition was filed originally Oct. 7 in New York Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The petitioners “are all T-Mobile customers whose data was breached and stolen due to T-Mobile’s negligence,” said the petition. The petitioners are all consumers who agreed to T-Mobile’s terms and conditions, including the mandate that all disputes be resolved through arbitration, it said. The consumers filed the petition “due to T-Mobile’s refusal to move forward with arbitration and pay the arbitration fees despite their contractual requirement to do so” under the company’s own terms and conditions, it said. T-Mobile didn’t comment Tuesday.

An Oct. 24 decision from U.S. District Judge William Bryson for Delaware held that certain claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) germane to the controversial practice of web scraping “were sufficient to survive" the defendants' motion to dismiss, Jeffrey Neuburger, co-head of Proskauer’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Group, said in an analysis Thursday. Bryson's opinion (docket 1:20-cv-01191) “potentially breathes life into the use of the CFAA to combat unwanted scraping,” said Neuburger. Low-cost European airline Ryanair sued five travel booking companies in September 2020, alleging they engaged in web scraping to collect data from myRyanair, the restricted-access section of the airline’s website, then used that data to enable users to book Ryanair flights on their own websites, often at higher fares than Ryanair was offering. Ryanair also alleged that the web-scraping defendants circumvented the technology that Ryanair installed to prevent unauthorized users from accessing myRyanair. The Delaware court allowed the unauthorized access claims to go forward, on grounds that Ryanair had raised a "plausible" argument when it asserted that the myRyanair portion of its website was nonpublic, "thus making the defendants’ continued access to those pages unauthorized for purposes of the CFAA,” said Neuburger. The ruling suggests that a “cognizable vicarious liability” claim under the CFAA is “certainly possible in certain circumstances,” he said. Those scenarios include where the commissioning party has the requisite knowledge and control over the scraper’s actions or if a party induces another to commit violations of the CFAA, he said. Bryson's ruling also is noteworthy because it suggests that a CFAA intent to defraud claim might be pleaded, “based on actions taken by data scrapers to avoid anti-scraping technologies,” he said. “It remains to be seen how future courts would characterize specific anti-detection measures under the CFAA.”

AT&T and T-Mobile want the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Sherman to issue a protective order to prevent disclosure of their confidential information during discovery of AT&T’s Sept. 6 false advertising complaint over T-Mobile’s BannedSeniors.com campaign, said the carriers in a joint motion Friday (docket 4:22-cv-00760). There's good cause for a protective order, said their motion. AT&T and T-Mobile expect during discovery to exchange confidential information that, if disclosed outside the safeguards of a protective order, “would create a substantial risk of serious harm to the competitive position of the parties,” it said. Protection of confidential information is necessary “because discovery in this action will require disclosure of documents that are relevant to the claims and defenses asserted,” said the text of the proposed order. “It is likely that such documents will contain confidential personal information, financial information, and/or proprietary or trade secret information.” AT&T alleges in its complaint that each of the claims in the BannedSeniors.com campaign is "literally false" when T-Mobile asserts that 92% of U.S. seniors can't get an AT&T discount because they live outside Florida. T-Mobile moved Sept. 16 to dismiss the case for lack of personal jurisdiction on grounds that AT&T's claims do not belong in a Texas court.

Defendants Experian and Verizon will meet with attorneys for plaintiff Helen Pollak no later than Dec. 14 to discuss settlement options and develop a proposed discovery plan in Pollak’s Oct. 7 Fair Credit Reporting Act complaint against the two companies, said an order signed Wednesday (docket 4:22-cv-00637) by Chief U.S. District Judge Beth Phillips for Western Missouri in Kansas City. She ordered discovery to begin immediately after the conference. She also ordered the parties to file a joint proposed scheduling order and discovery plan by Dec. 28 and Pollak’s lawyers to take the lead in preparing the proposed plan. Pollak’s complaint alleges that Experian refuses to remove a fraudulent Verizon account from her credit profile and that Verizon has refused to communicate about the account and has provided no avenue to correct the record (see 2210070053). Experian denied any FCRA wrongdoing and said that Pollak will need to deal directly with Verizon herself. Verizon has yet to file an answer to the complaint.

Judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “are getting tougher on lawyers who represent serial plaintiffs by reducing their fees and threatening sanctions,” said Seyfarth Shaw in an analysis Thursday. In an Oct. 24 opinion in Shayler v. 1310 PCH , the 9th Circuit panel affirmed the district court’s order awarding a reduced attorney’s fees and costs following the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff on a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The plaintiff, a serial ADA litigant, moved for an award of more than $34,000 in attorney’s fees and costs, said the opinion. But the district court “reduced this award significantly,” citing factors “such as the routine nature of the work performed by the plaintiff’s attorneys,” it said. This decision “should be useful for businesses fighting fee petitions filed by serial plaintiffs in routine cases,” said Seyfarth Shaw.