RICHMOND, Va. (Legal Newsline) - Trial lawyers who paid for accident reports so they could target motorists with offers to represent them in court can’t be sued under a federal law that protects personal information obtained “from a motor vehicle record.”
Upholding a lower court’s dismissal of the cases, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that while the lawyers unquestionably used information found on the drivers’ licenses in accident reports, they didn’t directly obtain it from a Department of Motor Vehicles database.
Two groups of North Carolina drivers sued a number of law firms, accusing them of violating the privacy of accident victims by cold-calling them with lawsuit offers. They cited the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (“DPPA”), a federal law passed in 1994 that prohibits the disclosure of “personal information” contained in motor vehicle records for improper purposes.
The trial court dismissed the cases, ruling that while the plaintiffs had standing to sue under DPPA, the lawyers hadn’t violated the law because the lawyers obtained accident reports from public information requests or through brokers.
The Fourth Circuit agreed with the trial court’s decision, on slightly narrower grounds. First, it agreed the plaintiffs had standing to sue, even though the U.S. Supreme Court, with decisions including Spokeo v. Robins, has said plaintiffs can’t sue over purely statutory violations. In this case, the Fourth Circuit ruled, the DPAA protects privacy interests that long have been the basis for suing.
The plaintiffs lost anyway. One set amended their complaint to say the lawyers were “obtaining” private information instead of “using” it, a fatal mistake, the court said. Since the lawyers already had the information and the plaintiffs had already been in accidents, there was no ongoing harm for the court to stop with an injunction.
More importantly, the plaintiffs didn’t claim the lawyers got their personal information from a “motor vehicle record” as required under the law. While the lawyers used information that originated in motor vehicle records, the court ruled, there is no evidence here they actually accessed a DMV database to get it.
”This case might be different if Congress had said what the plaintiffs assert Congress meant, i.e., that the DPPA protects personal information derived from a motor vehicle record, even if a defendant did not retrieve the information directly from such a record,” the court concluded. “But Congress did not enact such a law.”