KEEP YOUR PROMSIES!: Court Sets In-Person Evidentiary Hearing to Examine TCPA Defendant’s CRM Records After Defense Counsel “Failed to Follow Through”

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Think you can hide records in a TCPA case? Think again.

TCPA defendant Czar Marketing Group was just ordered to show up in a Florida courthouse with a laptop and grant access to their CRM to a federal judge and things should never have gotten this far.

In Gramps v. Czar Marketing Group, 2026 WL 2321695 (M.D. Fl. Aug. 11, 2026) a federal judge has expressed concern over a failure by defense counsel–not Troutman Amin, LLP obviously-to keep promises they made regarding the production of records. This angst has boiled over to an order compelling the defendants in the suit to show up and be prepared to allow access to records directly to the court.

Here’s what happened.

During a discovery dispute the defense counsel agreed they would search Czar’s CRM–I wonder if I have a trademark claim here?–and determine whether Resort Sales by Spinnaker, Inc. and Vacation Resorts Consultants, LLC had a CRM that could be searched. Then counsel would provide a record of all calls made to the named Plaintiff to Plaintiff’s counsel.

The time for this production came and went and most of these materials were not produced–not good. Even worse, what was produced was a single sheet that looked nearly identical to a previously-produced record but that appeared to have been altered and may have been a phony record.

Plaintiff’s counsel–the aggressive Chris Gold– immediately responded threatening a motion to compel:

they appear to be substantially identical in nearly every respect, including not only the overall interface,
but also the same visible lead records, the same timestamps within those records, the same sorting and
filter indicators, the same scrollbar position, the same desktop environment, and even what appears to
be the same Windows taskbar showing the identical date, time, weather widget, and open applications
as the prior production. The only readily apparent differences appear to be the date-range fields and the
removal of the record-count line.

Interesting, no?

Well the court certainly found it interesting. And to get to the bottom of it the Court set an in-person hearing to review the content of the Defendants’ CRM:

Given the inexplicable similarities between the recent CRM search printout and the Original Search printout, and Defendants’ failure to offer a satisfactory explanation, the Court will conduct an evidentiary hearing regarding the completeness of Defendants’ dialer-record production. The in-person hearing will be conducted before the undersigned in Courtroom 1A in the Ocala Courthouse on August 24, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. At the hearing, Defendants shall be prepared to produce in realtime, full and complete unfiltered CRM search results from each Defendant showing all inbound and outbound calls to and from Plaintiff for the full four-year period preceding the filing of the Complaint, with the date restrictions and the single-phone number filter visible to confirm that the search captures all telephone numbers Defendants used to place calls. This should resolve the motion to compel regarding discovery requests for call detail records as to Plaintiff’s individual claims.

My goodness. I have been doing this a long time and I have never seen a court order a live review of evidence from a defendant’s CRM in a courthouse. This is one fed up judge…

Needless to say the Defendants better not doing anything crazy like delete records. I see a spoliation fight on the horizon here– and it will not end well.

All of this was set up by the court faulting defense counsel for failing to follow through on agreements ahead of the hearing:

[T]he record suggests that Defendants have failed to comply with their discovery obligations. Indeed,
other than defense counsel providing some unverified information, Defendants have not supplemented their deficient discovery
responses related to Plaintiff’s individual claims. And, a review of the email correspondence discussed above shows that defense
counsel failed to follow through on various agreements to produce additional records.

Not good.

Although it would be easy to fault counsel here–they made promises they didn’t keep to Chris Gold and he made them pay for it– I suspect this is an issue with an uncooperative client that did not produce records to counsel upon request. I don’t know that, but I do know the lawyers involved here and I would be surprised if they just willingly blew off a deal they had made.

So the lesson here is make sure you’re playing straight with your lawyers in these TCPA suits. Anytime you are in federal court you are dealing with an extremely powerful judge who has a tremendous number  of tools to get to the truth. And if they ever think you’re being dishonest you are in a world of hurt.

Have to commend Chris Gold here. He is pursuing this one with diligence and skill and I like to see people held to account for the promises they make. Far too much leniency on people breaking their word. Hate to see it.

We’ll keep an eye on this.

And you should be keeping an eye on Deserve to Win Podcast Episode 45 with Cyle Coffman. Check this thing out right now!:

Chat soon.

 

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Published by Eric "Czar" Troutman

The Czar of TCPAWorld Eric Troutman is one of the country’s prominent class action defense lawyers and is nationally recognized in Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) litigation and compliance. He has served as lead defense counsel in more than 70 national TCPA class actions and has litigated nearly a thousand individual TCPA cases in his role as national strategic litigation counsel for major banks and finance companies. He also helps industry participants build TCPA-compliant processes, policies, and systems. Eric has built a national litigation practice based upon deep experience, rigorous analysis and extraordinary responsiveness. Eric and his team feel equally at home litigating multibillion dollar telecommunications class actions in federal court as they do developing and executing national litigation strategies for institutions facing an onslaught of individual TCPA matters. They thrive in each of these roles – delivering consistently excellent results – while never losing sight of the client experience. While many firms now tout TCPA expertise, Eric has been there from the beginning. He built one of the country’s first TCPA-only defense teams and began serving as national TCPA counsel for his clients nearly a decade ago. This perspective allows him to swiftly develop the right litigation strategies for dealing with recurring problems, without wasting time on tactics that are bound to fail. Eric’s rich historical perspective and encyclopedic knowledge of the TCPA landscape also make him an invaluable resource to institutional compliance teams struggling to comply with the shifting regulatory landscape. No task is too small – or too big. Indeed, Eric and his team have helped build TCPA-compliant systems and processes for some of the largest and most complex corporate entities in the country. He commonly works with in-house compliance counsel to build and implement enterprise and business-line specific TCPA solutions, performs TCPA audits and drafts and reviews proposed TCPA policies and procedures. He and his team also have the technical expertise necessary to assist call centers seeking to develop TCPA-resistant call path architecture or to modify existing telephony and software integration to better insulate from potential TCPA exposure. Eric has built a reputation for thought leadership. An avid blogger and speaker, he has been at the forefront of the industry’s effort to push for clarity and a return to sanity for the TCPA for years. He was selected to advocate for the financial services industry on important TCPA issues before the Federal Communications Commission and co-authored the nation’s only comprehensive practice guide on TCPA defense. In his spare time, Eric leads defense teams representing banks and other financial services companies in consumer finance litigation matters. He has experience representing clients in UCC, TILA, RESPA FCRA, CCRA, CLRA, FDCPA, RFDCPA and FCCPA claims, as well as in fraud and bank operations issues.

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