By the time the gavel struck back on June 26, 2017, another high-dollar TCPA settlement was inevitable. On that date, Judge Matthew F. Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois entered an order preliminarily certifying a TCPA class action and granting injunctive relief in favor of the class members preventing Ocwen from engaging in certain alleged conduct that the Court found violated the TCPA. See Snyder v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 99900 (N.D. Ill. June 28, 2017). Whether or not Ocwen was actually engaging in illegal activity mattered not, as the entry of a class-wide preliminary injunction against it served as the proverbial writing on the wall—this case was bound for another eye-catching TCPA class settlement.

Surely enough, on July 28, 2017—a mere one month following the preliminary certification order—the parties alerted the Court that a class-wide settlement had been reached. The resolution was finally presented to the Court for preliminary approval last Friday, September 15, 2017. The settlement is another doozy— a $17,500,000 settlement fund to pay claims related to calls placed to just 1,685,757 unique cell phone numbers. At $10.38/cell phone number called, this class settlement is one of the highest per-cell number figures paid in a mass-resolution TCPA class settlement. (For context, the normal range for these settlements is between $3.00 and $5.00 a cell phone.) Each claiming class member is likely to recover less than $500.00. The attorneys will likely recover over $5,000,000.00. So it goes with TCPA class actions.

The settlement also, predictably, contains an injunctive relief component requiring Ocwen to make very specific modifications to its TCPA practices.