In Meyer v. Sprint Spectrum, L.P. (2009) — Cal.Rptr.3d —-, 2009 WL 197560, the California Supreme Court held that a CLRA plaintiff must have actually been damaged in order to maintain a CLRA claim. The case arose from the plaintiffs’ lawsuit against their cellular telephone company, alleging that its arbitration agreement was unconscionable, even though plaintiffs did not allege that their cellular telephone company had enforced the clause against them. The Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue under the CLRA without some allegation that he or she has been damaged by an alleged unlawful practice, an allegation plaintiffs did not sufficiently make here.
In the present case, however, because Sprint had not sought to enforce any unconscionable term against plaintiffs, Sprint has not actually imposed additional transaction costs on plaintiffs. Although the allegedly unconscionable terms may at some future time require plaintiffs to expend greater costs and legal fees should a dispute arise that requires arbitration or re-sort to other remedial provisions, it would contort the statutory language to conclude that the preemptive expenditure of fees for this litigation means that Sprint’s alleged unlawful practices had caused “dam-age” at the time the lawsuit was filed. If we were to so conclude, then the mere employment of an unlawful practice would be sufficient to authorize a CLRA suit, a meaning which, as discussed above, the language of the statute does not support. We decline to extend Kagan to situations in which an allegedly unlawful practice under the CLRA has not resulted in some kind of tangible increased cost or burden to the consumer.