Telemarketing Litigation & Compliance

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), its corresponding Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, its parallel Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulations and its state-law analogues, constitute a dense, hyper-technical legal regimen with enormous penalties—ranging from $500 to $1,500 per violation, even without an actual injury, in the TCPA context. State law analogues, like Florida’s Telemarketing Solicitation Act, are likewise growing as popular tools of the plaintiffs’ bar as they, too, are often equipped with statutory damages provisions.

The TCPA and state telemarketing laws impact all industries that engage in any form of communication by telephone, fax, or text message—even with current customers—including healthcare, retail, hospitality, debt-collection and food & beverage. Failure to comply with these ever-growing regulations poses significant risks to companies, exposing them to state and federal investigations and fines, as well as civil lawsuits from private litigants.

Benesch has been counseling clients on telemarketing matters and defending TCPA claims for more than a decade. Our presence is nationwide and we have successfully defended cases in dozens of state and federal jurisdictions coast-to-coast, at all levels of litigation, including trial courts, appellate courts, state supreme courts and before the FCC. There is a wide range of claims that can be brought under the TCPA and we have counseled clients on, and litigated, all of them.

We have succeeded in advancing truly innovative defenses at all stages of litigation, including raising novel standing defenses in state and federal court, affirmatively moving to deny class certification at the outset, conducting consumer surveys and absent class member discovery to defeat class certification, and advancing creative legal arguments to end cases at the pleading, class certification, and merits stages.

Benesch provides more than just legal defense. Our telemarketing practice is state of the art and we boast proprietary data analytics and in-firm developed software that has been specifically designed to analyze call record data. This technological insight guides our legal opinions and defensive strategy, allowing us to translate legal arguments into something that the data actually supports. Our successes in this field occurred because our Telemarketing Team knows both the law and the technology that is the cornerstone to compliance counseling and a successful defense.

Deep experience with this statute and its commensurate regulations is essential to obtaining favorable results in any telemarketing action. Further, we do much more than litigate. A significant part of our practice involves proactive counseling on a host of intricate compliance issues. We work closely with our clients to design and implement marketing campaigns, calling campaigns, growth strategies and calling technologies that comply with the statutory language of the TCPA (and its regulations) and state analogues.

We are at the forefront of defending telemarketing cases our team has been often recognized as expert in this field. Our name on the pleadings sends a potent message to plaintiffs’ counsel in these cases, as our defense victories have had a ripple effect on this industry. We have prevailed in all sizes of TCPA cases with acumen and cost effectiveness, from small claims cases up through multi-billion-dollar exposure class actions, and serve as national counsel for several Fortune 500 companies for defense of TCPA claims brought against them.