In Mason v. Spring EQ, LLC, No. 5:24-cv-01833-MWC-AGR (C.D. Cal. July 6, 2026), a TCPA defendant tried a bold move late in the game. After a Do Not Call Registry class was certified, Spring EQ asked the Court to send more than 15,000 class members off to individual arbitration. The hook was a lead-generation website's updated Terms of Use, effective April 2025, that required anyone submitting a form to arbitrate on an individual basis. The theory was that every class member who filled out a form after mid-April 2025 had quietly agreed to give up their day in court.
Mind you, this is after Spring EQ had been heavily litigating the case in federal court since September 2024...
The Court easily denied Spring EQ's motion on two independent grounds.
First, the Court found Spring EQ's motion to compel arbitration was untimely as it was filed well past the Court's January 23, 2026 deadline to file dispositive motions.
Eesh. Just plain missed the deadline.
Second, and more memorably, waiver. Under Ninth circuit precedent a party gives up its right to compel arbitration when it knows about the right and then acts inconsistently with it. Both of those boxes were checked. The defendant had flagged arbitration as an affirmative defense back in February 2025, then spent the next fifteen months doing just about everything except moving to compel: extensive fact and expert discovery, discovery-dispute fights before the magistrate judge, motions to dismiss, motions to strike pleadings, motion to decertify, and detailed scheduling negotiations that laid out a plan with no arbitration motion anywhere in it.
The result? the Court noted:
"Looking at the totality of Defendant’s actions, Defendant has acted inconsistently with the right to arbitrate, because Defendant has made intentional decisions not to move to compel arbitration and actively litigated the merits of the case for a prolonged period to take advantage of being in federal court."
Another interesting point here: by the time this arbitration motion landed, Spring EQ was on its second set of lawyers. The first firm appears to have been replaced not long after the plaintiff won the class certification battle.
So why sit on arbitration until the eleventh hour?
One can only speculate...
Maybe the defense was cocky in their prediction that the class would never be certified and decided to swing for the fences on that fight, saving arbitration as a backup that it never expected to need.
Or maybe defense counsel's fee meter was simply running up the bill. Or maybe somehting else entirely.
Either way, the defendant has likely spent into seven figures defending this thing—and with the amount of class members multiplied by TCPA's statutory damages per violation, the exposure now climbs into a range that can make a million-dollar defense tab look like a rounding error.
All of which leaves a quiet question hanging over the docket: why didn't Spring EQ come to the mediation table much earlier and try to get something done? The world may never know, and maybe Spring EQ ends up pulling a rabbit out of a hat at summary judgment, but from the posture of the case thus far... I doubt it.
Anyway, great win for the consumers here. Will be watching this one closely.
