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OH THE IRONY: Company That Helps Consumers Bring TCPA Suits Just Helped Stop TCPA Suits (And I Missed It At First)

OH THE IRONY: Company That Helps Consumers Bring TCPA Suits Just Helped Stop TCPA Suits (And I Missed It At First)
Friday, June 25, 2021

I’m a guy who specializes in nuance and subtlety. This is true with respect to the esoteric issues in a fast-moving area of law, in the subtle facial or voice fluctuations that suggest a witness is being dishonest and–most of all–in appreciating and admiring the metaphysics behind coincidence.

As such, I consider irony the most delightful of stews.

Here’s some irony for you.

A company that helps consumers bring robolawsuits against companies that call their consumers just won a very meaningful victory narrowing the TCPA.

So backing up, you might remember I did a secret show a while back where I talked about push button legal demands that an app was providing.

Well apparently the company behind the app–donotpay–was itself sued in a lawsuit brought by the Hiraldo brothers and company alleging that it was violating the TCPA by sending text messages using an ATDS without consent.

So a company that helps people bring TCPA suits was sued in a TCPA suit. And defended itself by arguing that only random-fire dialers are subject to the TCPA.

Even more oddly–at least to me–PACE (an organization that supports outreach efforts) actually submitted an amicus brief supporting DoNotPay, a company that (as far as I can tell) helps consumers sue its members.

I mean, that’s just bizarre. (Michele–am I missing something here?)

Anyway, the resulting opinion was Hufnus, which is a big win for TCPA Defendants–again it holds that FN7 is limited to circumstances in which dialers call from a randomly-produced list.

The irony was, ironically, lost on me until DoNotPay reached out to me and asked to have me backlink to their site. Which I did, but which also refreshed me as to who these folks actually are– a group that facilitates the very lawsuits they just defeated.

So this is all very fascinating to me. Hope you enjoyed as well.

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