TCPA risk seems to be dropping everywhere you look.
The Supreme Court recently limited the TCPA’s ATDS defintion.
The Fifth Circuit recently held express written consent is not needed for marketing calls.
The Seventh Circuit seems ready to hold SMS messages are not covered by the TCPA’s DNC rules.
The FCC’s one-to-one rule is long dead, and lead generators and call centers seem to be in a new era of ring and sling.
But TCPA case filings continue to rise.
Why?
There seems to be an unspoken awareness that AI Voice is driving huge promise in the industry– it also creates entirely new channels of revenue for TCPA Plaintiff’s lawyers.
Make no mistake- GenAI calls are subject to the TCPA’s regulated technology provision. This is a prerecorded or artificial voice call. There’s just no escaping that reality. And these calls will trigger myriad state law rules as well.
Yes, these calls can still be made with “express consent”– but the contours of what qualifies as “express consent” is undetermined. And piles of lawsuits will be needed to flesh the phrase out in the context of outbound GenAi.
Adoption will massively outpace clarity. It always does.
And that means risk will outrun compliance. It always does.
So exposure will follow. And the vultures of the Plaintiff’s bar will have their next great feast.
The filings are already pouring in. The rulings will follow. But by then it will already be too late for most companies.
And a 4 year statute of limitations assures risk is unescapable in the long term.
But as call center shift to AI agents Plaintiff’s lawyers stand ready to bring suit by the metric ton. Its ringless voicemail for them all over again– times 10.
And just like in the old RVM days, the Ai voice sales guys are promising the world.
Some companies are actually pretty great. But most are trash start ups sitting atop Chat or Claude.
Don’t get me wrong there are valid use cases for GenAI in outbound voice channels. But the Plaintiff’s lawyers are sitting there. Like gargoyles. Just waiting.
The TCPAWorld never ends. Never shrinks. Never shirks.
It just keeps right on rolling at the center of the universe.
So as your institution adopts Ai voice outreach make sure you’re paying very close attention to TCPAWorld.
You might even want to give Troutman Amin, LLP a call now and save yourself a bunch of headaches down the line.
Or don’t.
The future of TCPA risk is coming either way.
And you can expect my rate to be $10k an hour next year. 😉
Chat soon.