HORTON HAMMERED: Repeat TCPA Litigator Lucas B. Horton Held in Contempt after Manufacturing Evidence and Abusing Counsel in TCPA Suit

Law Conference of Champions V ticket prices as I type: $509.00 (and rising!)

“God, you’re a clown.”

These are among the kinder words spoken by Lucas B. Horton directed at opposing counsel conducting his deposition in a TCPA suit not long ago. Horton was verbally abusive calling counsel names and criticizing his progression through the deposition.

This might not have been so bad except the court had previously ordered the parties to treat one another civilly– and order the Court determined Horton had badly disobeyed in mistreating counsel.

So Horton was just held in contempt of court.

But somehow that is the least of his worries.

In PivotHealth Holdings LLC, v. Lucas B. Horton, Case 2:24-cv-01786-SHD, Doc. 93 (D. Az. Nov. 3, 2026) the court granted summary judgment to Pivot finding Horton had manufactured evidence and pursued a TCPA suit against the healthcare company without probable cause– as a result Horton is going to have to pay the entire cost of the previous defense!

The facts here are pretty absurd.

There were two claims in the underlying suit– one a TCPA suit and one a refund request suit.

On the TCPA claim Horton actually settled his claim with RankMedia agreeing to pay him $18k to resolve his claim that RM had sued him without consent on calls that lead to him buying a policy from Pivot to “find out” who had called him. Part of that release, however, included a release of Pivot– the company that had bought the live transfer from RM.

Despite the release Horton still brought suit against Pivot– a real no no. The Court also found Horton alleged Pivot made the calls at issue directly even though he knew better. Not good.

In the court’s mind these facts combined to make the TCPA suit against Pivot utterly meritless and pursued in bad faith. Hence the Court granted summary judgment to Pivot on its malicious prosecution claim.

The refund claim is somehow even more insane.

Horton had sued Pivot claiming it failed to give him a refund upon request. The only problem is– he didn’t actually request a refund using the proper channel before filing the suit. Instead he had just emailed Pivot’s then counsel (who he later called a douchebag) requesting the refund.

That might not have been so bad except in 2024 Pivot served discovery asking Horton to prove he had made a refund. Horton then sent an email to Pivot asking for a refund. But then he modified the request to make it look like it had been sent in 2022– but the metadata proved the record had actually been created in 2024 just 7 minutes after he sent the request to Pivot!

In other words Horton created a record in 2024 claiming that he had sent a request in 2022 that he never sent. So so so bad.

When Pivot threatened to subpoena Horton’s email records to prove the 2022 was never sent Horton turned around and dismissed the suit. But Pivot would have its revenge. It affirmatively brought suit against Horton… and the rest, as they say, is history.

So bottom line Horton has been held in contempt for mistreating counsel in civil litigation and has been found to have manufactured evidence and brought a completely meritless suit.

That seems to be the end of his litigation career. My goodness.

Remains to be seen just how much this will cost him but Pivot spent over $140k defending the underlying suit and probably spent a similar amount pursuing him– so this might cost Horton over a quarter million dollars. We shall see.

Notably this INSANELY GREAT result was brought to you by Ryan Watstein’s shop.

This is the same guy that has Heidrapour on the ropes for potentially setting up class actions and who also just got Daniel Human and his Counsel sanctioned for destroying evidence in a suit.

I mean what an incredible run!

Now I know Ryan is very humble and would likely give credit to his team for these results and to his clients for having the guts to pursue these affirmative actions– pretty brave to spend that kind of money pursuing these affirmative claims– but he is the genius behind the whole thing and I could not be more impressed.

I think we’re going to have to have this guy on stage at Law Conference of Champions V! Two full days of TCPA, data privacy, and AI regulation discussion and presentations that will land lawyers tons of CLEs and business folks tons of actionable take aways. Prices rise daily so get in now!

Hope to see you all there!