Lisa Mabary v. Home Town Bank, N.A.

771 F.3d 820, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 21145, 2014 WL 5801352
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
DecidedNovember 5, 2014
Docket13-20211
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 771 F.3d 820 (Lisa Mabary v. Home Town Bank, N.A.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Lisa Mabary v. Home Town Bank, N.A., 771 F.3d 820, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 21145, 2014 WL 5801352 (5th Cir. 2014).

Opinion

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge:

Lisa Mabary filed a class action claim alleging that Home Town Bank violated *822 the Electronic Funds Transfer Act 1 (“EFTA”) by failing to post an external notice of fees on its automatic teller machines (“ATMs”). While the suit was pending but before class certification, Congress amended the EFTA to eliminate the external notice requirement. 2 The district court dismissed Mabary’s claim and denied class certification. We REVERSE the dismissal of Mabary’s claim and VACATE and REMAND the denial of class certification.

I.

On October 19, 2010, Mabary sued Home Town Bank (“Home Town”), on behalf of herself and all others similarly situated, alleging that Home Town violated the EFTA and its implementing Regulation. 3 The EFTA requires any ATM operator who imposes a fee on users to provide notice that a fee will be charged and the amount. 4 At the time Mabary filed her suit, the statute required that the notice be posted in two places (the “two notice” provision): both externally at the ATM machine (the “posted notice”), and on the screen of the ATM or on a paper printout before the transaction is completed (the “screen notice”). 5 If a transaction fee is charged without the required notice, the statute provides that consumers can recover actual damages, statutory damages, costs, and fees. 6

In her complaint, Mabary alleged that in 2010 she was charged a $2.00 fee in connection with one or more electronic fund transfers she completed using Home Town’s ATMs. She claimed the ATMs lacked the posted notice required by the statute. There is no dispute that Mabary received an actual screen notice of the fee and accepted an on-screen prompt to continue with the transaction after the notice. Mabary’s suit thus did not seek actual damages for herself or for any putative class member. Rather, she sought “statutory damages for violations of a consumer protection law where Plaintiff and the putative class have not suffered any actual out-of-pocket economic injury.” Mabary sought to represent a class of persons to be defined as follows: All persons who: (1) were charged a “terminal fee” at ATMs operated by Defendant when such persons made an electronic fund transfer and/or balance inquiry where, (2) no notice indicating that such fee was to be charged was posted on or at the outside of the ATM machine.

On February 3, 2011, Home Town made a Fed.R.Civ.P. 68 Offer of Judgment to Mabary, which Home Town contends tendered the full amount of Mabary’s individual claim. Mabary did not accept the offer, and filed a First Amended Complaint and Motion for Class Certification on February 7, 2011.

On February 21, Home Town filed a motion to dismiss the Amended Complaint under Fed. R. of Civ. P. 12(b)(1), contending that its Rule 68 offer divested the court of subject matter jurisdiction by mooting Mabary’s individual claims. The district court denied the motion to dismiss on June 27.

On October 5, 2011, Home Town filed a Motion to Dismiss or Alternatively for Stay. Home Town argued that Mabary lacked standing because, having received actual notice of the fee, she suffered no *823 injury-in-fact. On November 22, the district court certified the class. But it later determined it had improperly certified the class before resolving Home Town’s Motion to Dismiss, and decertified the class on December 21. Home Town requested a stay pending Supreme Court review of a related case, First American Financial Corporation v. Edwards. 7 The district court granted the stay. The Supreme Court later dismissed First American as improvidently granted. 8 The district court then unstayed Mabary’s case on August 10, 2012, and considered the Motion to Dismiss. It found that Mabary did have standing to proceed because the injury required by Article III may exist solely by virtue of the invasion of legal rights, and it denied the motion on August 30. 9 On November 19, the district court stated it was ready to reinstate certification but requested updated briefs.

During that process, Congress unanimously enacted H.R. 4867 (the “EFTA amendment”) 10 on December 20, 2012, which amended the EFTA by repealing the posted notice requirement, leaving only the screen notice requirement that Mabary indisputably received.

On July 15, 2013, the district court denied Mabary’s motion for class certification and dismissed her suit with prejudice. Having determined that Mabary’s claim did not survive the passage of H.R. 4367, the district court also concluded that unnamed class members could not become parties to the litigation on the basis of a class claim that no longer existed.

Mabary timely appealed.

II.

Home Town first contends that Mabary lacks standing to bring her claim because she indisputably received actual notice of the ATM fee and thus suffered no injury-in-fact. Home Town characterizes the form of the notice required by the statute as nothing more than a procedural mechanism whose absence creates no concrete injury. “[Deprivation of a procedural right without some concrete interest that is affected by the deprivation — a procedural right in vacuo — is insufficient to create Article III standing.” 11 But we must disagree that Mabary suffered no concrete injury-in-fact as required by Article III. “Many statutes, notably consumer-protection statutes, authorize the award of damages (called ‘statutory damages’) for violations that cause so little measurable injury that the cost of proving up damages would exceed the damages themselves, making the right to sue nugatory.” 12 The EFTA’s damages provisions is a valid enforcement mechanism for such an injury here. A user of an ATM is not in the same position to decline an ATM transaction at the initial point, where she walks by the ATM and sees the posted notice that Congress required, as she is at a later point, when she receives on-screen notice only after having retrieved her ATM card, entered personal information such as a Personal Identification Number, and initiated a transaction. Congress’s determination that consumers were entitled to the fee information they need to decline a *824 transaction before investing the time needed to initiate it protects a substantive, if small, right, and its deprivation is an injury-in-fact that allows Mabary to pursue her claim here. 13

III.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

Related

Wheat v. Florida Parish Juvenile Justice Commission
811 F.3d 702 (Fifth Circuit, 2016)
Epps v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
307 F.R.D. 487 (E.D. Arkansas, 2015)
Federal Trade Commission v. AT & T Mobility LLC
87 F. Supp. 3d 1087 (N.D. California, 2015)
James Frey v. First National Bank Southwest
602 F. App'x 164 (Fifth Circuit, 2015)
Fontenot v. McCraw
777 F.3d 741 (Fifth Circuit, 2015)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
771 F.3d 820, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 21145, 2014 WL 5801352, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/lisa-mabary-v-home-town-bank-na-ca5-2014.