The Act instructs the FCC to establish a safe harbor for telephone providers who inadvertently block calls or callers whose calls should not be blocked, provided that the provider can demonstrate that they were given incorrect information by the call authentication frameworks.

The best practices for avoiding Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) violations and the attendant lawsuits are as follows:

Make Sure You Have Clear Consent
In order for a court to proceed with a class action, the class must first be certified. When it comes to the TCPA, if the defendant can provide evidence of consent procedures, and prove consent for the individual plaintiff, the class as a whole, or a subset of the class, then the class certification may be denied.

A predictive dialer system operates from a list of phone numbers, automatically dials multiple numbers simultaneously and directs the calls to live agents based on predictions about when the agent will likely be available to handle the call. If the consumer answers, the system directs them to an agent. If the agent is unavailable, it often drops the call.

The Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) has a safe harbor provision specifically designed for predictive dialers that allows for a 3% call abandonment rate.

Generally, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) prohibits calls to a wireless number using an Automatic Telephone Dialing System (ATDS) without prior express written consent. However, there is a limited safe harbor in cases where a landline number was recently ported to a wireless number without prior knowledge from the marketer.

The federal government’s National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry is managed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under the auspices of the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR). Within that regulatory framework, there are best practices guidelines that, when paired with supporting documentation, allow for the possibility of claiming safe harbor.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2015 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) Omnibus Declaratory Ruling and Order established a one-call safe harbor for reassigned phone numbers. This safe harbor applied to situations in which callers mistakenly called a phone number for which they had previously received consent but had since been reassigned to another person. Because consent is tied to the called party and not the phone number, the phone call in this situation would be considered a violation.