T-Mobile Seeks to Compel Damages Estimates From Fake Ring Tone Plaintiffs
More than three and a half years since Craigville Telephone and Consolidated Telephone filed their fake ring tones case against T-Mobile (see 2301270006) and more than two years since discovery began, the plaintiffs still “refuse to meet their Rule 26(a) damages disclosure obligations,” said T-Mobile’s memorandum of law Monday (docket 1:19-cv-07190) in U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois in Chicago in support of its motion to compel the damages information.
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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.
T-Mobile isn’t seeking “the final, precise damages number” the plaintiffs’ damages expert “may proffer,” said the memorandum. It’s seeking only the plaintiffs’ categories of alleged damages, and for each category, the methodology on which the plaintiffs’ damages are based, it said.
T-Mobile “needs this information to take fact discovery” and to defend against the plaintiffs’ damages claim, said the memorandum. Though the plaintiffs broadly seek hundreds of millions of dollars in compensatory damages for lost terminating access charges, other forms of lost revenue and business disruption costs, they “provide nothing more,” it said.
If the plaintiffs intend to seek damages for alleged lost access charges, “they must at a minimum disclose” the types of calls for which they are seeking lost access charges, the access charge rates for those calls and whether they intend to multiply the number of calls by the access charge rates, said the memorandum. If the plaintiffs intend to seek damages for “alleged lost time value of labor hours,” they must at the very least disclose “an approximation of the hours worked and the relevant employees’ hourly rate, it said.
The plaintiffs also must provide the basis for why they’re claiming the incurred hours, and how those hours relate to T-Mobile’s conduct, said the memorandum. The plaintiffs’ “steadfast refusal” to provide this information prejudices T-Mobile’s ability “to request specific documents during discovery and conduct meaningful fact depositions on damages,” it said.