TCPA & Telemarketing Compliance

Shipkevich PLLC advises companies on Telephone Consumer Protection Act compliance and defends them when they are sued. For any business that reaches consumers by phone or text, the TCPA is the statute most likely to produce litigation. It carries statutory damages of $500 for each violating call or message, trebled to $1,500 where the violation is willful or knowing, and it requires no showing of actual injury. Multiply that figure by a calling list and the exposure in a putative class action becomes existential, which is why a substantial plaintiffs’ bar has grown up around the statute and why the same handful of serial filers appear on dockets across the country.

We work with debt relief and debt settlement companies, consumer law firms, tax relief companies, fintech lenders, payment companies, lead generators, and marketing and contact center operators. These are businesses for which outbound and inbound calling is a primary channel, and for which a single lead vendor’s poor consent records can generate years of litigation. Our work covers the entire arc: how campaigns and dialers are configured, how consent is captured and documented, what vendor agreements say about who bears the risk, how demand letters are answered, and how cases are defended in court and in arbitration.

The current consent standard. Telemarketing calls and texts placed with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice require prior express written consent. That means a signed agreement, with an electronic signature acceptable, clearly authorizing the seller to deliver marketing messages, accompanied by a clear and conspicuous disclosure and notice that signing is not a condition of purchase. The FCC rule that would have required separate consent for each seller, and limited calls to subjects logically and topically associated with the consumer’s original interaction, was vacated by the Eleventh Circuit in January 2025 before it took effect, and the Commission formally removed the language later that year. A single consent may again cover multiple sellers as a matter of federal law, which shifts the practical risk from the rule to the quality of the lead source and the strength of the contract behind it.

How consent may be revoked, and how fast it must be honored. The FCC revocation rule took effect in April 2025. A consumer may revoke consent by any reasonable means, and a caller may not designate one exclusive method. Common opt out words in a reply text, including stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel, and unsubscribe, are automatically treated as reasonable. Revocation must be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days. Where two way texting is not supported, the caller must clearly disclose an alternate opt out method. The broadest portion of the rule, which would treat one revocation as applying across a caller’s other messaging, has been delayed more than once, most recently to January 2027, and a further FCC proceeding on revocation opened in late 2025 remains pending.

What changed in TCPA litigation strategy. In June 2025 the Supreme Court held in McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates v. McKesson that district courts are not bound by the FCC’s interpretations of the TCPA in private enforcement actions and must interpret the statute themselves. Arguments that were previously foreclosed by an agency ruling are now available to both sides, and courts have already begun to divide on questions that had seemed settled, including whether the do not call private right of action reaches text messages at all. Separately, the Supreme Court’s narrowing of the autodialer definition in Facebook v. Duguid continues to defeat claims built on ordinary list based dialing platforms, which has pushed plaintiffs toward prerecorded and artificial voice claims that require no autodialer and toward do not call and state law theories.

State law is now the faster moving risk. Florida, Oklahoma, Maryland, Washington, Oregon, and others have enacted their own telemarketing statutes, several with private rights of action and consent standards stricter than federal law. Texas amended its telemarketing law effective September 2025 to cover text, graphic, and image transmissions expressly, and to channel violations, including violations of its seller registration requirement, into consumer protection claims. New York enforces its do not call law through the Department of State, with penalties reaching $20,000 per violation. A company fully compliant with federal law can still face exposure under half a dozen state regimes, and increasingly does.

We publish regularly on these developments, including client alerts on the revocation rule and on decisions narrowing TCPA liability, and a program on the rise of unrepresented plaintiffs and pre suit TCPA demands.

Representative Experience

Serve as national outside TCPA and telemarketing counsel to debt relief, tax relief, fintech lending, and marketing companies, handling campaign and dialer design, consent architecture, lead purchase agreements, demand response, litigation, and arbitration in federal and state courts across more than ten states.
Represented a fintech lending brand and coordinated the defense of an eight company telemarketing ecosystem in a state do not call enforcement proceeding where each violation carried a potential $20,000 penalty, negotiating over global consent order terms and successfully resisting the naming of a non principal employee.
Defended clients against suits and demands brought by several of the country’s most active serial TCPA plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ firms, obtaining dismissals with prejudice, voluntary dismissals, arbitration referrals, and nominal settlements.
Designed a federal and fifty state outbound dialing compliance program for a financial services company launching a dialer operation on third party leads, followed by counseling on dialer configuration, abandoned calls, and voicemail drops.
Publish client alerts and present programs on TCPA developments, including the FCC revocation rule, decisions dismissing claims for lack of direct or vicarious liability, and the pre suit demand practices of unrepresented plaintiffs.

Key contact: Felix Shipkevich, Founder and Principal. Special Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University; Arbitrator, National Futures Association Board of Arbitrators (since 2006). Read full bio. To schedule a consultation, call (212) 252-3003 or contact the firm.

TCPA & Telemarketing Compliance

Representative Experience

Shipkevich PLLC

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