True story.

Michael O’Hare’s TCPA Litigator List sued Adam Young’s Ringba for stealing its litigator list. And the court dismissed the case as a discovery sanction after finding Plaintiff withheld evidence from Ringba’s lawyers.

Here’s the backstory.

TCPA Litigator List–as the name implies–is a provider of a list of litigators who like to sue people. Folks in the lead generation and call center industry will buy these lists to avoid calling people found on the list so as to not make themselves easy prey.

Interesting things flow from the existence of such lists. Litigators will oftentimes still get calls but then will have the call drop when the caller tries to transfer the litigator to a company using one of these lists. Others won’t get called no matter how many times they requests calls for information on goods or services. Its pretty interesting.

Regardless the story goes that Adam was considering adding a similar litigator scrub service to Ringba–everyone’s favorite PPC platform, and R.E.A.C.H. member–and bought a subscription to TCPA Litigator List.

O’Hare claims Adam improperly downloaded the list, stole it, and then built it into Ringba’s TCPA Shield product (after gentlemanly trying to buy O’Hare’s company for $70k first.)

Interestingly, Ringba’s defense in the case focused less on “no I didn’t” and more on “I was allowed to” when it came to the question of whether Ringba took and used the list. Apparently there were no terms and conditions that limited the use of the litigator list to build competing products and the lower court found the list “barely” qualified as a trade secret.

Although the case was set to proceed to trial on the trade secret part of the claim the case was soon dismissed after O’Hare’s lawyers apparently failed to turn over information that was in their possession and critical to the case. (An expert also apparently provided an opinion based on O’Hare’s memory although O’Hare testified his knowledge came from the expert so… yeah.)

Anyway all of this ended up on appeal and the Colorado Appellate court recently issued its order siding with Ringba and finding the lower court made no mistakes.

In TCPA Litigator List v. Ringba, 2024 WL 4233790 (Col. Sept, 19, 2024) the appellate court found the lower court acted within its discretion in dismissing the case for discovery failings. Any error in the MSJ ruling was solved by the terminating sanction for discovery. So Ringba walks away with a complete win.

Really fascinating case. The fact that things like “TCPA Litigator List” exist to begin with tell you just how dangerous the TCPAWorld is. And the fact that parties are fighting over the list as a trade secret really drives the point home. Fun stuff.

Hey Adam and Michael, happy to have you both on the podcast sometime– preferably at the same time!

Chat soon.