Telephone Consumer Protection Act from the Violator’s Side

Hi, I’m Danny Karon, your Lovable Lawyer here with your quick shot of legal wellness. For anyone who still gets faxes, ever get one like this? I got this recently and it was totally unsolicited. More commonly, I’m sure you get robo calls and junk texts. Those are the cell phone version, or equivalent, of these unsolicited faxes. Well, did you know that there’s a law that makes these sorts of communications illegal? It’s called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and it says that without prior express consent, a company may not make an autodown call or text to your cell phone, a pre-recorded call to your cell phone or landline, or send you a fax without an established business relationship. And if they do, you’re out $500 per call text or fax. If you can prove that the company acted intentionally, that can triple up to $1500, real money. Now a few months ago, I did a TCPA video from the recipients point of view because we all get these things. But a lot of you are small businesses, meaning you unwittingly blast junk faxes like this guy. That is extremely dangerous behavior.

To demonstrate, let me tell you a quick story. Maybe a year ago, I was retained by a company in Minnesota, a solo guy. He had a microscope repair shop, of all things. He’d taken it over from his dad and he wanted to grow his business a little bit so he came across a list of prospects that had fax numbers and he blast faxed thousands and thousands of prospects. Now, if you do the math, that could add up to a lot of money under the TCPA. One of them got its way into the hands of a veterinarian in Cleveland, Ohio who gave it to his lawyer. The lawyer sued a class action complaint against my client and if you do the math, millions and millions of dollars. And the scary thing is, on top of all this, most insurance policies exempt TCPA from coverage, which means this guy would have been on the hook to pay the judgment or go bankrupt.

So he was freaking out, as you would expect. Fortunately, through some clever lawyering, I got the case down to a couple of thousand dollars. We paid the plaintiff and the case went away. But, the thing is, it was scary stuff and it didn’t have to happen. It happened because he was careless. He didn’t know the law and he made a simple mistake. It can happen to any of us who don’t know the law, so don’t let it happen to you now that you know. Don’t blast faxes, don’t send texts and robocalls. You know not to because you know a little bit about the TCPA.

If you’d like to learn more about legal wellness, I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube page or join me at yourlovablelawyer.com. Until next time I’m Danny Karon, your Lovable Lawyer.