Ward v. Liberty Mutual: A Lead Website Class Gets Certified, Then Jornaya Evidence Heads to a Jury

The leads

In spring 2020, Liberty Mutual purchased 24,587 leads from an aggregator who said they came from a site called instant-auto-insurance-now.com. Its dialing vendor then placed 125,820 prerecorded calls to 20,254 cell phones, plus 56,517 calls and texts to 7,092 people on the National Do Not Call Registry. Each lead came with a Jornaya Lead ID and a "Visual Playback" of the form fill.

The plaintiff, Adam Ward, argues he never filled that form in.

Round one: class certified

Liberty Mutual argued consent was individual, pointing to Ward's prior TCPA suits and to calls he later made to the company. The court didn't buy it. Calls Ward made after the challenged messages can't show consent to those earlier messages. And the key question is common: can that one website's form count as consent to Liberty Mutual at all? Either the answer is yes, or it's no, and either way it gets decided once for everybody.

The court did flag one limit. If Ward's theory became that only some leads were fabricated, that would look individual.

Round two: nobody wins yet

Liberty Mutual conceded the elements of liability, so everything rode on its defenses.

Consent evidence gets in the door. Ward attacked the Jornaya playback as an unreliable simulation and pointed out nobody from the website testified. The court said Jornaya's records could likely come in as business records at trial, especially with an archived screenshot of the site.

But it doesn't win the case. The archive shows Liberty Mutual's logo on the form. The playback doesn't. The form only mentioned the website "and one or more of its marketing partners." Jornaya also concedes it can't detect bots or tell who actually typed the info. That's a jury question. The court noted the Eleventh Circuit's holding in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. Federal Communications Commission, 127 F.4th 303 (11th Cir. 2025), that consent need not be one-to-one, but didn't need to resolve how specific consent must be.

Safe harbor not proven. Liberty Mutual leaned on a declaration and one complaint handling policy. That policy covered list removals, not consent, dialers or recordkeeping, and training of vendors wasn't shown. Not enough at this stage, though it could still try at trial.

Why I care

The lead buyer's best shot here is a jury. A lot of exposure rests on how a website looked six years ago.

Takeaways

1. Keep your own screenshots of every lead source page, with your brand visible.
2. Don't rely on a vendor playback alone.
3. Put your do not call training and vendor oversight in writing.
4. Know where every lead actually came from.

General information only, not legal advice.

Read the summary judgment order in Ward v. Liberty Mutual and the class certification order in Ward v. Liberty Mutual.