What to do in the first 24 hours of receiving a TCPA lawsuit notice

Last updated 2026-07-11

What exactly is a TCPA lawsuit notice and how serious is it?

A TCPA lawsuit notice is formal legal process telling you that someone is suing your company under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227 ^[1]. It might arrive as a summons and complaint, a demand letter before filing, or a class action complaint naming you as defendant. The format changes the urgency. It does not change the treatment. Treat it as real, treat it as urgent, and do not assume it goes away.

The stakes are not abstract. The statute sets minimum statutory damages of $500 per violation, with treble damages up to $1,500 per call or text if the court finds the violation willful or knowing ^[1]. In a class action, where hundreds or thousands of alleged contacts get bundled together, that math turns ugly fast. The Cash App TCPA class action settlement resolved for $3.375 million. The Credit One TCPA settlement hit $12.5 million. These are not outliers. They are what happens when companies underestimate the notice stage.

A demand letter is not a lawsuit yet, but plaintiffs have filed within days of sending one. A summons means a case is already docketed and you have a response deadline, often 21 days under federal Rule 12, sometimes less. Miss that deadline and you can get a default judgment entered against you. So ask one question the moment the notice lands: is this a pre-suit demand or an actual filed complaint? The answer changes your timeline. It does not change your immediate steps.

What should you do in the first hour after a notice arrives?

The first hour is about containment, not strategy. Do three things, in this order.

First, stop all outreach to the named plaintiff. Pull their number out of every dialer queue, SMS campaign, and voicemail drop list right now. Any contact you make after receiving notice can be used to show ongoing willfulness, and willfulness is what converts a $500-per-violation case into a $1,500-per-violation case ^[1]. This is not the time for a courtesy follow-up or a dispute email. Radio silence.

Second, take physical possession of the notice. Photograph it. Note the timestamp. If it came by email, do not delete or archive the thread. If it landed on a receptionist's desk, find out what time it arrived and who signed for it. Courts sometimes fight over the date notice was actually received, and your internal records settle that fight.

Third, alert your chain of command immediately, even if that means calling your founder or CEO at home. A TCPA class action can expose the company to existential liability. Leadership needs to know today, not at the next staff meeting.

When should you call a lawyer, and does it need to be a TCPA specialist?

Call a lawyer today. Not tomorrow. Not after you review the complaint yourself. Today.

If your company has general counsel, that person is your first call, but be direct: TCPA litigation is a specialty. The procedural posture of these cases, the class certification risk, the FCC rulemaking history, the circuit splits over what counts as an automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS), none of that is intuitive for a generalist ^[2]. You want someone who has handled TCPA defense before, not someone who spends the first two weeks getting up to speed on your dime.

Ask your general counsel whether to bring in outside TCPA counsel immediately or whether they can handle it. If the complaint is a class action, outside specialist counsel is almost certainly the right call. If it is a single-plaintiff demand letter, a knowledgeable generalist may be fine, but get a second opinion.

Attorney-client privilege attaches from the moment of your first call. That matters because everything you document, everything you say internally about the merits of the claim, becomes potentially discoverable if you have not yet established privilege. Talk to counsel first. Then document your internal response under their direction.

How do you preserve evidence without accidentally destroying anything?

The moment litigation is reasonably anticipated, which is the moment a TCPA notice hits your inbox, the legal duty to preserve relevant evidence begins ^[3]. Courts call this the litigation hold. Spoliation, meaning the negligent or intentional destruction of evidence after that duty attaches, can trigger sanctions, adverse inference instructions, or worse.

Issue a litigation hold in writing, directed at every person and system that might hold relevant records. That includes your dialer platform, your CRM, your SMS gateway, your email server, your consent management system, and any third-party lead vendors who touched the plaintiff's record. In writing means a documented email or memo, ideally drafted with counsel, not a Slack message.

Preserve these categories of records specifically:

• Every call record touching the plaintiff's phone number, including timestamps, call duration, caller ID, and campaign name ^[4]
• Every text message sent to that number, including opt-in and opt-out records
• The consent record: the web form submission, the signed document, the recording, whatever you have that shows when and how the plaintiff allegedly agreed to be contacted
• Any scrub records showing whether the number was checked against the do not call list before contact
• Your dialing technology configuration at the time of the calls: what system you used, how it was configured, whether it had predictive or autodialing capability ^[2]
• Any third-party lead vendor contracts and the data you received from them

Do not delete anything. Do not ask your dialer vendor to "clean up" old records. Do not run your normal data purge cycle. If you have automatic deletion policies, suspend them for the relevant records immediately.

What records do you actually need to defend a TCPA claim?

Your defense lives or dies on consent records. Under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b), you generally cannot use an ATDS or prerecorded voice to call a cell phone without the called party's prior express consent ^[1]. For telemarketing calls and texts, the bar is higher: prior express written consent, as defined in the FCC's 2012 rule and refined through later orders ^[2].

A clean consent record showing the plaintiff knowingly gave their number and agreed to receive autodialed calls or texts is your primary defense. If you do not have that record, or the record is ambiguous, your exposure is real and your attorney needs the truth immediately.

Beyond consent, gather evidence for secondary defenses. Did you scrub the plaintiff's number against the National Do Not Call Registry before calling? Your scrub logs, with timestamps, are evidence. Some companies pull access to the do not call telemarketer list through the FTC's subscription process and log every scrub. Those logs are worth a lot. Did the calls use a live human agent with no ATDS in the loop? The definition of ATDS has been fought across circuits, and after the Supreme Court's Facebook v. Duguid decision in 2021, the scope narrowed sharply ^[5]. What technology you actually used matters.

If the plaintiff claims they never consented and you bought their data from a lead vendor, pull the vendor's documentation of where that consent was collected. Courts have looked at whether the disclosed purpose of the consent matched your actual outreach. If the plaintiff signed up for "home insurance quotes" and you called them to sell solar panels, that consent probably does not cover your contact ^[2].

Organize all of this before your first attorney call so you can give a real factual picture instead of a guess.

Should you contact the plaintiff or their attorney directly?

No. Do not contact the plaintiff or their attorney directly, especially not before you have your own counsel.

This sounds obvious. Companies still make the mistake. A well-meaning sales manager calls the plaintiff to apologize and offer a refund. That call is now evidence of an admission. A compliance officer emails the plaintiff's attorney to explain the situation and gets talked into concessions that bind the company. These things happen.

Once you retain counsel, all communication with the plaintiff's side runs through your attorney. That is more than professional convention. It is an ethical rule that bars opposing counsel from communicating directly with a represented party ^[6]. Get represented first. Then let your attorney handle every contact.

How do you assess your actual exposure before counsel calls back?

While you wait for your attorney to call back, run a factual inventory that will make that first call far more productive. Work through these questions honestly.

How many times did you contact the plaintiff's number? Pull the raw call and text logs. The per-violation math ($500 to $1,500 per contact) makes frequency the variable that drives everything ^[1].

Was the number on the National DNC Registry at the time of contact? You can check this retroactively to some degree. The FTC provides registry access to subscription holders ^[7].

What dialing technology did you use? A predictive dialer puts the ATDS question in play. Every call manually dialed by a human agent changes the ATDS analysis after Facebook v. Duguid ^[5].

Is this a class action or a single-plaintiff case? A single plaintiff claiming 10 calls is a very different financial picture than a class of 50,000 alleged contacts.

Did a lead vendor supply the plaintiff's number? If so, do your vendor contracts include indemnification clauses? Many do, and those clauses matter immediately.

Do not share this inventory with anyone outside the company until your attorney directs you to. Assembling it now means your first attorney call is a real conversation about liability range, not a round of guessing.

What TCPA exposure amounts should you realistically expect?

Settlements and judgments swing wildly based on class size, number of contacts, willfulness, and circuit. The chart below pulls a handful of real, public settlement figures to give you a sense of the range. These are not predictions for your case. They are data points on what the statute's per-violation math produces at scale.

Case	Settlement Amount	Class Size (approx.)
Cash App / Block TCPA class action [8]	$3.375 million	~4 million members
Credit One Bank TCPA settlement [9]	$12.5 million	undisclosed
Capital One TCPA settlement (2015)	$75.5 million	~21 million members
Dish Network FCC consent decree (2017)	$280 million	FCC enforcement
ViSalus TCPA judgment (9th Cir., 2022)	$925 million	~1.8 million robocalls

The ViSalus figure is the one to sit with. The Ninth Circuit upheld a $925 million judgment, calculated as $500 per call across roughly 1.85 million robocalls ^[10]. The per-violation math is not theoretical.

Run the small-team version. A team making 500 improperly documented calls at $500 per call sits at $250,000. At treble damages, $750,000. That is the range you are managing before attorney fees and litigation costs. Get real about the numbers early so you can make rational decisions about settlement versus defense.

What internal processes should you pause or change right now?

Beyond stopping contact with the plaintiff, look at your broader dialing operation and decide whether any current practice is creating more exposure while this case is live.

If your team is making autodialed calls or sending bulk texts to cell phones without airtight documented consent for each number, you have an ongoing compliance problem that is separate from this lawsuit but will become very relevant if plaintiff's counsel requests discovery into your general practices. Class action plaintiffs' attorneys hunt for pattern and practice evidence. Finding that you had no consent workflow at all across your whole book of business is exactly the kind of evidence that supports class certification and willfulness findings.

Now is the right time to run a real audit. Pull your cold calling consent documentation process, your opt-in records for text message marketing, and your DNC scrub logs. If they are thin or missing, fix them going forward. You cannot cure past violations by fixing your process today, but you can stop compounding your exposure while this case is pending.

LeadCompliant's free TCPA compliance checklist can help you spot gaps quickly, before outside counsel's formal audit runs up your legal bill. Use a tool like that for triage. Then let your attorney decide what the litigation-specific response requires.

Do not make dramatic changes to your dialing platform or consent records in a way that could look like evidence manipulation. Changing a record already under a litigation hold is spoliation. Adding better processes going forward is fine. Altering or deleting existing records is not.

Does your insurance cover TCPA claims?

Check your commercial general liability (CGL) policy and any errors and omissions (E&O) or professional liability coverage today. Some CGL policies cover TCPA claims under personal and advertising injury provisions. Others carry explicit TCPA exclusions. This is genuinely unsettled across carriers and jurisdictions. Courts have split on whether TCPA violations count as the kind of "publication" that triggers advertising injury coverage ^[11].

Call your insurance broker today, or have your attorney do it. If coverage exists, the carrier may have a duty to defend, which means they pay your legal fees even before liability is decided. That is a real financial lifeline in complex litigation.

Do not assume coverage exists or does not exist without reading the actual policy language. And do not make any admissions to the carrier that you would not make in court, because depending on the policy structure, you and your carrier may end up adverse to each other if coverage is disputed.

What happens after the first 24 hours and what should you expect next?

If the notice was a pre-suit demand letter, you may have anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before the plaintiff files. Your attorney will assess whether early settlement makes sense or whether the claim has enough weakness to defend.

If it is an already-filed complaint, your clock is running. Federal courts require a response to a complaint within 21 days of service under Rule 12 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, though extensions are often granted by stipulation ^[6]. Miss this deadline without an extension and you default, and a default judgment in a TCPA case with treble damages applied is a very bad outcome.

Expect early discovery requests, especially in class actions. Plaintiff's counsel will want your call logs, your consent records, your dialing system configuration, and your vendor contracts. Anything not preserved today will be gone then and may generate an adverse inference instruction.

Settlement is common in TCPA cases, often because the per-violation math makes defense through trial extremely risky. The FCC's complaint database gives plaintiff attorneys a ready source of prior complaints against companies ^[12], and your litigation history can be introduced to show pattern. Companies with clean records have more room in settlement. Companies with prior FCC complaints or prior TCPA suits have less.

Make sure your attorney walks you through the discovery timeline, the class certification motion timeline if applicable, and the realistic cost of defense versus settlement. Then make a business decision with all the facts in front of you, not one driven by pride or panic.

What does the TCPA actually say about your liability?

The core prohibition sits in 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(A), which makes it unlawful to "make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice" to any telephone number assigned to a cellular service ^[1].

The FCC has authority to issue rules implementing the statute, and it has done so extensively through orders since 1992 ^[2]. The definition of ATDS, the scope of consent, the rules around established business relationships, and the treatment of reassigned numbers have all been shaped by FCC rulemaking and challenged in courts. The 2021 Supreme Court decision in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid narrowed the ATDS definition sharply, holding that a system must use a random or sequential number generator to qualify, which pushed many modern predictive dialers out of the definition ^[5]. That does not mean you have no exposure if you use a predictive dialer. It means the ATDS argument is harder for plaintiffs, not gone.

The private right of action in § 227(b)(3) lets any person who receives a violating call sue for $500 per violation, or up to $1,500 if the court finds the violation willful or knowing ^[1]. There is no cap on the number of violations per lawsuit, which is why class actions with large alleged contact lists produce eight-figure settlements. Read the actual text, more than the summaries. The FCC's consumer robocall page links to the relevant statute sections and rules ^[12].

Frequently asked questions

How long do I have to respond to a TCPA lawsuit after I receive the summons?

Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(a), you generally have 21 days from the date you were served to respond to a complaint filed in federal court. Plaintiffs' attorneys often grant a brief extension by stipulation if you ask promptly, but you have to ask. Missing the deadline without an extension can produce a default judgment. Start counting from the actual service date, not the date you personally saw the papers.

Can I settle a TCPA case directly with the plaintiff without going to court?

Yes, but do not negotiate directly without an attorney. TCPA plaintiffs and their counsel settle cases regularly, and many single-plaintiff cases resolve before or shortly after filing. The risk of negotiating yourself is that you may make admissions, miss procedural issues, or agree to terms that create future liability. Let your attorney handle all settlement communications. Pre-litigation resolution is often faster and cheaper than discovery.

What is the difference between a TCPA demand letter and an actual lawsuit?

A demand letter is sent before a suit is filed. It states a claimed violation and usually demands a payment or threatens litigation. It carries no court deadline. An actual lawsuit comes with a summons issued by a federal or state court and a mandatory response deadline. Both deserve immediate legal attention, but a filed complaint has a hard clock ticking. Check whether the notice includes a case or docket number; if it does, it is a filed lawsuit.

Does it matter if the calls were made by a third-party vendor on my behalf?

Yes, and not in the way most companies hope. Under FCC guidance and case law, a company can be vicariously liable for TCPA violations committed by a vendor acting on its behalf if that vendor had actual or apparent authority to make the calls. If you hired a telemarketer or lead vendor who placed illegal calls using your brand or data, you may share liability. Pull your vendor contracts immediately and look for indemnification clauses.

What if I have consent records showing the plaintiff opted in?

Consent is your primary defense, but it has to be the right kind of consent for the right kind of contact. For autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls and texts, the FCC requires prior express written consent that clearly discloses the autodialed or prerecorded nature of the calls. A general terms-of-service checkbox probably does not qualify. Preserve every record of the consent: the IP address, the timestamp, the form version, and the exact language shown to the user.

Can a single robocall really generate a lawsuit?

Yes. The TCPA creates a private right of action for every individual violation, and each call or text counts separately. Single-plaintiff suits over a handful of contacts are common because the math still produces $500 to $1,500 per call with no requirement that the plaintiff prove actual harm. Courts have consistently upheld this structure. One improperly placed autodialed call to a cell phone is enough for standing.

What should I tell my sales team right now?

Tell them to stop all contact with the named plaintiff's number immediately and to preserve any records they have touching that person. Beyond that, instruct them not to discuss the lawsuit externally or with anyone not specifically authorized by counsel. Do not ask them to delete records, change notes in the CRM, or characterize past calls differently. Under attorney direction, they may later need to answer questions; make sure they know not to speculate or guess in writing.

Does the TCPA apply to B2B calls to cell phones?

The TCPA's cell phone autodialed call prohibition applies based on the number being assigned to a cellular service, not based on whether the call's purpose is B2B or B2C. If you are autodialing or sending prerecorded messages to what turns out to be a cell phone, the restriction applies regardless of the business context. The FCC has not carved out a blanket B2B exemption for autodialed calls to cell phones, though some circuits interpret consent more liberally in a business relationship.

What is spoliation and why does it matter here?

Spoliation is the negligent or intentional destruction of evidence after a duty to preserve it has attached. That duty attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated, which is the moment a TCPA notice arrives. If relevant records are deleted, overwritten, or lost after that point, courts can impose sanctions ranging from monetary penalties to adverse inference instructions, meaning the jury is told to assume the missing evidence would have hurt you.

Should I notify my insurance carrier about a TCPA lawsuit?

Yes, and do it within 24 to 48 hours. Many commercial general liability and E&O policies have notice requirements that, if violated, can void coverage. Whether TCPA claims are covered depends heavily on the specific policy language; some policies cover them under personal and advertising injury, others carry explicit TCPA exclusions. Courts in different jurisdictions have reached opposite conclusions. Let your attorney and broker review the policy together before you make any representations to the carrier.

How do class action TCPA suits differ from single-plaintiff cases?

A class action aggregates claims from many plaintiffs, often hundreds of thousands, into one suit. The per-violation math becomes enormous quickly. Class actions also have a class certification stage where the plaintiff must show that common questions of law and fact predominate across the class. Defeating class certification is often the most important goal in early litigation strategy. A single-plaintiff suit is simpler and usually resolves faster, often through direct settlement.

What is the FCC's role in a private TCPA lawsuit?

The FCC does not prosecute private TCPA lawsuits; those are brought by private plaintiffs or state attorneys general. The FCC's role is rulemaking and its own enforcement actions, which can include consent decrees and civil penalties paid to the government. FCC rules and orders define the standards that courts apply in private suits, so FCC guidance on consent requirements and ATDS definitions directly shapes how courts rule in private litigation.

Can I use a TCPA compliance checklist to prepare before counsel arrives?

Yes, and doing so makes your first attorney call much more productive. Before that call, gather your call logs, consent records, DNC scrub history, and dialing platform details. A compliance checklist helps you spot which records exist and which are missing. LeadCompliant offers a free TCPA compliance kit you can use for this triage. Just do not share your gap analysis externally until you have established attorney-client privilege.

Sources

1. U.S. Government Publishing Office, 47 U.S.C. § 227 (Telephone Consumer Protection Act): Statutory damages of $500 per violation, trebled to $1,500 for willful violations; prohibition on ATDS calls to cell phones without prior express consent
2. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 37(e), U.S. Courts: Duty to preserve electronically stored information once litigation is reasonably anticipated; sanctions for spoliation
3. FTC, National Do Not Call Registry, Business Guidance: Call records and scrub logs as evidence of DNC compliance; FTC oversight of registry access
4. Supreme Court of the United States, Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (2021): ATDS definition narrowed to systems using random or sequential number generators; most modern predictive dialers excluded from this definition
5. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 12(a), U.S. Courts: 21-day deadline to respond to a complaint after service
6. FTC, National Do Not Call Registry: Telemarketers can access and scrub against the DNC Registry; scrub logs serve as compliance documentation
7. FTC, Legal Library (cases and proceedings), Cash App / Block TCPA class action: Cash App TCPA class action resolved for $3.375 million covering approximately 4 million class members
8. FTC, Legal Library (cases and proceedings), Credit One Bank TCPA settlement: Credit One TCPA settlement reached $12.5 million
9. United States Courts, Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ViSalus Inc. TCPA judgment, No. 21-35201 (9th Cir. 2022): $925 million judgment upheld for approximately 1.85 million robocall violations at $500 per call
10. Insurance Information Institute, commercial general liability overview: Courts have split on whether TCPA violations trigger personal and advertising injury coverage under CGL policies