Ochsner v. Adapthealth, Corp., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 166484 (S.D. Tex. July 1, 2026)
Every so often a discovery order does more work than a summary judgment ruling, and this is one of them. In this TCPA class action, the plaintiff received at least eleven prerecorded debt-collection calls aimed at whoever used to hold his cell number. He had no debt and no account with the defendant. The number had simply been disconnected and reassigned to him — the kind of thing a glance at the FCC's Reassigned Numbers Database would have caught before the first call went out. He brought claims on behalf of a class of everyone who got prerecorded voice calls at numbers not tied to one of the defendant's customers or account holders, and he moved to compel discovery into the defendant's own "wrong number" and "wrong person" records.
The Court granted that motion in part — and in doing so handed the plaintiff exactly the roadmap a wrong-number class is built on.
The defendant tried to shrink the case with three arguments, and it is worth appreciating how little any of them held up.
First, it said discovery should be confined to the single campaign that reached the plaintiff, because its other campaigns were exempt "health care" or "emergency" calls, or played a prerecorded voice only to voicemail, so nobody was ever live enough to report a wrong number. The problem is that those exemptions are contested, fact-intensive merits defenses — and a defendant does not get to grade its own exam and excuse whole categories of its calls from discovery before anyone has tested whether the exemptions apply at all.
Second, it claimed its systems couldn't tell a wrong-number report apart from an ordinary opt-out, and that a configuration setting had stopped logging those reports entirely from June 2023 to May 2026. The Court called this what it was: a "self-serving and untested characterization" of the defendant's own systems, which the plaintiff was entitled to probe rather than accept on faith.
Third, it pleaded burden — gathering records across "18 million calls in the PFS OSBalance Agentless campaign, let alone 163 million calls across all campaigns" would be crushing — and offered, in lieu of real production, a tidy sample of 500 randomly selected numbers.
Then, the day before the hearing, the defendant filed a notice explaining that it had checked again and "located records that contained the wrap-up codes for each of the calls" placed in the campaign — the very records it had spent its briefing describing as unlogged, unsearchable, or gone. The plaintiff had already pointed to the defendant's own exhibits, which showed dedicated wrap-up codes like "Right Number Wrong Person," "Incorrect Contact," and "New Phone Number Provided" sitting right on the wrong-party call paths. It is hard to run the "we can't find it" defense and the "here it is" notice in the same week.
So the burden argument collapsed on contact with the defendant's own files, and the Court was blunt about the principle: a producing party "is best situated to preserve, search, and produce its own" electronically stored information, and — a line worth taping to the wall:
"a defendant may not avoid certification of a class by arguing their business records are not efficiently organized and maintained."
Disorganization is not a privilege or a shield.
Here is what the defendant now has to do. It must serve a complete amended interrogatory answer identifying, across every one of its outbound campaigns — not just the one that called the plaintiff — each CRM field, wrap-up code, dropdown, checkbox, text field, and flag it uses to record that it reached the wrong number or wrong person, and where each of those lives in its systems. That answer is a map straight to the class list, because a defendant's "wrong number" annotations are, functionally, a running roster of its calls to non-customers. The Court rejected the one-campaign limit, rejected the 500-number sample, and deferred the document production without prejudice only so the plaintiff can renew it once that map is in hand.
And because the same data bears on whether the defendant kept calling after learning it had the wrong person, it feeds directly into the knowing-and-willful question behind treble damages. The defendant now faces class-wide exposure across millions of calls, built out of records it insisted it couldn't produce.
The takeaway for plaintiffs and their counsel in wrong-number class actions is straightforward. Ask for the annotations, not just the calls — the "wrong number" and "wrong person" codes, the fields where they live, and the interrogatory that forces the defendant to name them. Read the defendant's own exhibits, because dialer documentation routinely describes the exact wrap-up codes a defendant later swears it doesn't keep. And treat "we can't search our systems," "those campaigns are exempt," and "here's a random sample instead" as the trio they are — arguments that, on this record, a court was willing to overrule in a single order.
