Class Certification Denied in Yelp Telemarketing Lawsuit

Yelp Telemarketing Violations Class Action Lawsuit Overview: 

• Who: Jonathan Sapan filed a class action lawsuit against Yelp, Inc.
• Why: According to the lawsuit, Yelp had violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by making unauthorized calls. A California judge has denied class certification, but allowed Sapan’s suit to move forward individually.
• Where: The lawsuit is pending in California federal court.

A class action lawsuit accusing Yelp of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) by making unauthorized telemarketing calls, will not move forward, according to an order filed by U.S. District Judge James Donato. However, the suit can proceed on lead plaintiff Jonathan Sapan’s individual claim. 

Class certification was denied because Yelp publishes reviews and serves the advertising needs of businesses, it does not typically direct users to personal information. As a result, the company may be subject to exemptions in the TCPA for calls to numbers that are linked to an existing business relationship, or which otherwise have provided consent to be called. 

“For certification purposes, Sapan had to come up with a method that would reasonably account for the TCPA exemptions without entailing individualized inquiries for each putative class member,” Donato says in the order. “Despite a number of opportunities to do that, Sapan has not succeeded. The original certification motion said almost nothing about how class members would be identified within the parameters of the proposed class definition, or how the TCPA exemptions would be reasonably accounted for on a class wide basis.”

The judge also stated that Sapan “dropped the ball” during discovery as he “had not obtained anything close to a usable record of Yelp’s calls to putative class members, which was vital evidence for certification purposes,” according to the order. 

Sapan was only able to obtain a few months of call records, well short of the several-year liability period alleged for the proposed class.

Have you received unauthorized telemarketing calls from Yelp? Let us know in the comments! 

The plaintiff is represented by Jeffrey B. Cereghino of Cereghino Law Group.

The Yelp Telemarketing Violations Class Action Lawsuit is Sapan v. Yelp Inc., Case No.  3:17-cv-03240, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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