Today is the 30 year anniversary of President George H.W. Bush signing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) into law. It is fitting that this anniversary is somewhat overlooked as, for the first two decades of its existence, the TCPA served its intended, modest purpose as a statute allowing individual consumers to bring lawsuits in small claims court.
Thanksgiving is coming up soon and marketers may well find themselves thankful that they are not in regulatory hot water like the callers in the following cases.
Two of our points of emphasis for Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) compliance are: 1) litigators can be extremely tricky; and 2) the TCPA can be very expensive. A series of recent lawsuits against a single defendant all by a single plaintiff’s attorney illustrate these points.
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) lawsuit that sets a potentially dangerous precedent with regards to sellers being held vicariously liable for the actions of lead generators.
In a reversal from how these things usually go, an arbitrator has ruled that the plaintiff in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) lawsuit must pay the defendant $286,064.62. The arbitrator determined that this serial plaintiff had perpetrated a scheme in which he induced the defendant to call him over 600 times in order to manufacture a TCPA lawsuit.