Experian secures precedent-setting Ninth Circuit decision limiting FCRA's scope

Client(s) Experian Information Solutions, Inc.

Jones Day successfully represented Experian Information Solutions, Inc. before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the scope of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Seeking to represent a nationwide class, the plaintiffs alleged that Experian willfully violated consumers' privacy rights by surreptitiously collecting and selling their behavioral data for marketing purposes. In a precedent-setting decision, the Ninth Circuit adopted Jones Day's argument that the FCRA should be narrowly construed to cover only traditional forms of credit data. The court rejected the plaintiffs' more expansive reading of the statute, finding that it would subject "huge swaths of information" to the FCRA, even if the information never appeared in a credit report. The court observed that the statute should be interpreted to encompass only information that is shown to have been included in a credit report in the past or planned to be included in the future. The decision capped a series of class actions that had been brought by the same plaintiffs' firm in California and Nevada seeking to expand the scope of the FCRA.

Tailford v. Experian Information Solutions, Inc., No. 20-56344 (9th Cir.)