A federal judge in Maryland denied class certification in a TCPA robocall lawsuit against ExamWorks, LLC, ruling that the proposed class could not be identified in a workable way and that the lead plaintiff was not fit to represent it. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland's ruling came from Judge Paula Xinis on September 21, 2026, in Smith v.
ExamWorks, LLC, No. 8:21-cv-02746-PX. The decision does not dismiss the case. It only blocks the plaintiff, Michael Smith, from suing on behalf of a larger group; his own claim can still move forward as an individual lawsuit.
Table of Contents
- What Happened in Smith v. ExamWorks
- Why the Court Denied Class Certification
- Can Michael Smith Still Pursue His Own Claim?
- Is This Part of a Broader Pattern in Maryland Courts?
- What This Means If You Received Similar Calls
What Happened in Smith v. ExamWorks
ExamWorks, LLC schedules independent medical examinations, the exams insurers order when someone files an injury claim. According to the court opinion filed with govinfo.gov, Michael Smith alleged that ExamWorks sent thousands of non-emergency, prerecorded appointment-reminder calls to the cell phones of people with GEICO-related injury claims.
Smith wanted to represent everyone in that position: insurance claimants who got these prerecorded reminder calls without having given their cell number to ExamWorks themselves. His own number had reached ExamWorks indirectly, through GEICO rather than through any direct contact with ExamWorks. Smith asked the court to certify that group as a class and let the case proceed on a classwide basis, but the court denied the motion after a hearing, according to Ginsburg Law Group's analysis of the ruling.
Why the Court Denied Class Certification
The court's reasoning did not turn on whether ExamWorks broke the law on a mass scale. Instead, according to Kelley Drye's TCPA Tracker, the court denied certification for two procedural reasons: the proposed class could not be ascertained in a reliable way, and Smith himself was not an adequate representative for the group he wanted to lead. Ascertainability means a court must be able to identify who belongs in the class without turning the case into thousands of individual mini-trials. The consent question is what broke that down here.
The opinion examines whether someone who hands their phone number to an insurer, who then passes it to a company like ExamWorks, has effectively consented to get automated calls at that number, as discussed in the National Law Review's coverage of the ruling. Answering that question requires looking at each person's individual circumstances, not applying one rule to the whole group. That individualized inquiry is exactly what defeats class treatment under federal procedure. When the central legal question can't be answered the same way for everyone in the proposed class, a court cannot certify it, no matter how many calls the defendant made.
Can Michael Smith Still Pursue His Own Claim?
Yes. Denial of class certification ends the group lawsuit, not Smith's personal claim. He can continue to pursue ExamWorks individually under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the federal law that restricts prerecorded and autodialed calls to cell phones.
The TCPA sets statutory damages at $500 per illegal prerecorded call, a figure that rises to $1,500 per call if the violation is found willful, according to Ginsburg Law Group. Those numbers apply per call, so an individual plaintiff who received multiple unwanted calls can still recover a meaningful amount even without a class behind them. This is the practical tradeoff of a certification denial: no shared payout for a large group, but the person who filed suit keeps a path to compensation scaled to how many calls they personally received.
Is This Part of a Broader Pattern in Maryland Courts?
The ExamWorks ruling is not an outlier. In March 2026, a separate Maryland federal court granted reconsideration and decertified a TCPA class against DentalPlans. That court reasoned that, after the Supreme Court's Loper Bright decision, the FCC's prior-express-written-consent rule no longer binds courts the way it once did, according to Sidley's Data Matters.
Together, these two rulings point to a pattern: Maryland federal courts are treating consent and the ability to identify class members as individualized questions that block the "predominance" requirement for class certification, according to the Consumer Financial Services Law Monitor. Predominance requires that common questions affecting the whole class outweigh questions specific to individual members. For robocall plaintiffs, this means a defendant's scale of calling does not automatically translate into a certifiable class. A company can place thousands of calls and still avoid classwide liability if the consent question has to be answered person by person.
What This Means If You Received Similar Calls
If you received prerecorded appointment-reminder calls from a medical-exam scheduler, insurer-affiliated vendor, or similar company without a class action available to join, your options narrow to filing or joining an individual claim rather than waiting on a group settlement. A few things to check before deciding: Readers who were part of a certified TCPA class elsewhere should not assume Maryland's outcome applies to their case; certification decisions turn on facts specific to each defendant's calling practices and each district's current reading of consent law.
- Whether you gave your phone number directly to the caller, or it reached them through a third party like an insurer, since that distinction is central to how Maryland courts are now analyzing consent.
- How many prerecorded or robocall-style messages you received, since TCPA damages run per call rather than per lawsuit.
- Whether the calls were non-emergency and automated or prerecorded, the category the TCPA restricts, rather than a live person calling to confirm an appointment.
- Any record you kept of call dates, since an individual claim still needs to show the calls happened and how many there were.