With the ever-changing case law surrounding the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, staying up to date with what cases are relevant and where courts stand on certain, very important definitions, can be an almost impossible task. Further, in the 28 years since the TCPA was enacted, the legislation has been considered outdated by many companies. As industry groups continue to challenge several aspects of the Federal Communications Commission’s interpretation of the TCPA, courts have also increasingly…

As the world waits to see whether the United States Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a magistrate judge in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida recently weighed in on the issue, denying a defendant’s motion to dismiss a class action where the defendant contended that the TCPA unconstitutionally limits commercial speech. In Grigorian v. Tixe Realty Services, the defendant sought to expand…

California court vindicates HCI (once again) as not covered by TCPA, but finds 70 calls over four months potentially harassing A recent California decision touched upon two recurring sources of lawsuits against debt collectors: whether calls are subject to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and whether the sheer number of calls can constitute harassment barred by debt collection laws. The Court gave a mixed result, ruling that the debt collector’s telephony system was not subject to the…

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act discriminates between types of calls based on content: persons calling to seek collection of federal debts get an exemption from TCPA requirements, while other types of calls do not. Federal courts have split over whether this discrimination is constitutional, setting up in the long term a possible Supreme Court showdown. In the meantime, federal courts continue to split on the issue.  On September 5, a judge within the District of Delaware joined…

On September 10, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers entered a $267 million judgment against a debt collection agency that made more than 534,000 telephone calls in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The judgment ended three years of class action litigation after plaintiff Ignacio Perez and two others alleged that defendant Rash Curtis & Associates called their cellular telephones using automatic telephone dialing systems and without the plaintiffs’ prior consent.  In September 2017, Judge Rogers granted…

When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided ACA International v. Federal Communications Commission[1] in March 2018, many viewed the decision as a potential swan song for the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Experts predicted the FCC, buoyed by Chairman Ajit Pai, would step in quickly to reform existing regulatory guidance interpreting the statute. After all, before his promotion to chairman, Pai decried the FCC’s 2015 order interpreting the TCPA as “dramatically…

On July 16, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed a decision from the Eastern District of Missouri awarding $32 million in a Telephone Consumer Protection Act class action. Significantly, in doing so, the Court upheld the district court’s decision to limit the jury’s award to $10 per call for a class of 3.2 million members. According to the Court, an award of $500 per call would have been shockingly large, implicating due…