A San Francisco-based law firm is now working with two Bethel attorneys who filed a class action lawsuit against GCI for their marketing practices in the YK Delta.
“We’re hoping that we can have some resolution or go to try within the next year,” said Bethel Attorney Dave Henderson. He and fellow attorney Jim Valcarce filed the lawsuit.
“GCI sold wireless services for voice and data plans and promised that they’d be reasonable and reliable and the services were not reasonably functional and reliable,” Henderson said.
Four Bethel residents filed the class action lawsuit against in April of last year.
The lawsuit alleges that the data plan GCI enrolled thousands of customers in rarely worked. Clients commonly experienced slow data and dropped calls, the lawsuit claims.
Henderson said the case is taking a lot of work and energy.
“We’re fighting against a company that has almost unlimited resources and there’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of discovery and documents we need to go through about the service that was provided,” Henderson said.
Henderson and fellow attorney Jim Valcarce teamed up with San Francisco-based law firm of Gerard Gibbs to work on the case. The law firm specializes in class action lawsuits.
“Given the facts here, we thought it made sense to work with Dave and Jim to represent the users of GCI services during the time period the case covers,” said Dan Gerard, the managing partner at the firm.
The case focuses on GCI services from 2010-2014. The plaintiffs are seeking to get their money back on grounds of fraud and misrepresentation and breach of contract.
David Morris, GCI VP of corporate services, wouldn’t say much about the ongoing case right now.
“All I can say is that the lawyers are still playing bat mitten on the legal issues and it just goes back and forth,” Morris said.
The case is currently in the middle of hearing and depositions. It has not been decided if the lawsuit will go to trial.
