Tag: telemarketing

If your GTM stack uses an AI agent to draft outbound messages, or a CPaaS provider like Twilio to deliver them, the Lowry v. OpenAI lawsuit should be on your radar — and on your CFO’s.

The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, is the first major TCPA complaint to advance a clean ‘platform liability’ theory against an AI provider and a CPaaS provider for messages sent by a downstream customer. The theory could quietly reset the risk model for every GTM team running AI-augmented outbound.

What the complaint actually says

The plaintiff, William Lowry, alleges he received unwanted marketing text messages from a third party called Fresh Start Group, sent via Twilio-provisioned numbers, that were generated using OpenAI’s platform. The complaint names OpenAI and Twilio as defendants under the theory that they ’caused’ the messages to be initiated.

The proposed class: every U.S. consumer who received a marketing message generated on the OpenAI platform where the number was on the DNC list and OpenAI lacked consent. At $500 per message with a four-year lookback, plaintiff’s counsel has cited theoretical exposure in the trillions. That’s not what they’ll get. It is, however, the number that will frame every settlement conversation.

Why this is a GTM problem, not a vendor problem

The instinct of marketing-ops leaders reading this is to say: ‘good, that’s Twilio’s and OpenAI’s problem.’ That instinct is wrong, for two reasons.

First, if vendors face platform liability, they will push it back into customer contracts. Expect tighter indemnity clauses, mandatory consent attestation, audit rights into your CRM and lead-source records, and the right to suspend service on suspicion of non-compliance. Your GTM stack just became contractually more fragile.

Second, if the platform-liability theory works, plaintiff’s counsel will keep climbing the stack. CPaaS and AI providers are the obvious first targets. CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and lead-gen vendors are the obvious second wave. Eventually, the ask will be: ‘who in this supply chain actually documented consent?’ If the answer is no one — or only the operator at the end — that operator pays.

What GTM and marketing-ops teams should do now

Audit your AI outbound surface. Inventory every use of an AI-generated message in your stack: outbound email personalization, SMS drafting, voice agents, chatbots that escalate to call. For each, write down: who triggered it, what consent was on file, what platform generated it, what platform delivered it.

Reread your CPaaS and AI vendor contracts. Most disclaim TCPA liability and shove it back to the customer. After Lowry, expect renegotiation pressure in both directions — the vendor will want stronger attestations from you; you’ll want clearer indemnity if their inadequate guardrails contributed to a class.

Build a consent ledger. A single source of truth for every number in your outbound stack, with timestamp, source, channel scope, and opt-out status. If a Lowry-style case finds you as a downstream sub-defendant, the ledger is your defense.

Stop using AI to scale calling that wasn’t consented to. The fastest way to land in a Lowry-style class is to use AI to dramatically expand the reach of a list that didn’t have rigorous consent provenance. AI multiplies your risk surface at the same rate it multiplies your output.

For GTM and marketing-ops leaders, this is exactly the kind of risk that should live inside your lead lifecycle, not in legal’s inbox. TCPALitigatorList.com gives revenue teams a way to suppress known TCPA litigators and serial plaintiffs at the top of the funnel — before a number ever hits the dialer, the SMS platform, or a sales rep’s queue. Treat it the same way you treat email-deliverability hygiene: a quiet, automated check that keeps your pipeline from blowing up.

Regulatory backdrop

The FCC has already declared that AI-generated voices count as ‘artificial or prerecorded voice’ under the TCPA, and has issued cease-and-desist letters to infrastructure providers (including Twilio in 2024) over alleged enabling of illegal robocall traffic. Lowry is the litigation-side extension of that regulatory posture.

For GTM teams, the through-line is simple: as AI gets integrated deeper into outbound motions, the legal system is allocating liability across the stack, not just at the customer-facing entity. Build your consent architecture to survive that allocation.

Sources

National Law Review: TCPA Complaint Against OpenAI and Twilio
Lexology: New TCPA Complaint Could Change Everything

Ringless voicemail (RVM) has lived in a strange corner of the GTM stack for years — a high-deliverability, low-friction channel that growth teams reach for when email and SMS are saturated. The pitch is appealing: messages get into the consumer’s voicemail without interrupting them. The legal reality, in 2026, is brutal.

Two recent cases should reshape how GTM teams think about RVM as a channel — and whether it should remain in the stack at all.

Case one: National Retail Solutions, $6.5M

NRS, a B2B point-of-sale technology vendor, just agreed to pay more than $6.5 million to resolve a TCPA class action over its RVM campaigns. The settlement covers a class capped to messages sent through a single RVM provider, yet still exceeds 50,000 class members each set to receive more than $100. The economics are not subtle.

The GTM read: NRS was running a growth motion that probably looked like a low-risk, high-output channel inside their funnel. It wasn’t. The cost-per-acquisition for that channel — once you back the settlement into the math — has obliterated whatever pipeline it built.

Case two: GoHighLevel + a Las Vegas realtor

A solo realtor in Las Vegas used GoHighLevel to drop ringless voicemails on expired listings. A court certified a TCPA class against her, finding she had no documentation of consent from the class members and that the messages qualified as prerecorded calls subject to the TCPA.

The lesson for GTM and marketing-ops leaders is sharp: your platform’s automation does not insulate you from TCPA exposure. If your stack supports an action, and you take that action, you own the consent risk. The platform doesn’t.

What the FCC actually says

In 2022, the FCC issued a Declaratory Ruling holding that ringless voicemails to wireless phones are ‘calls’ under the TCPA and require prior express written consent. That rule has not been softened. If anything, recent court decisions have hardened it — including a 2025 case holding that simply alleging identical message content is enough to support a prerecorded-call claim at the pleadings stage.

That last point matters operationally. It means a plaintiff doesn’t need a forensic audit of your stack to survive a motion to dismiss. They just need to allege your messages look the same to multiple recipients. Your campaign architecture is the evidence.

The GTM playbook on RVM

Reclassify RVM as a regulated channel. In your lifecycle plan, treat RVM the same way you treat outbound calls — prior express written consent, channel-specific opt-in, DNC scrub, litigator suppression, revocation handling.

Pull RVM from cold motions. If you’re using RVM for prospecting or expired-listing outreach, that is the highest-risk use case and the one courts are most willing to certify against.

Audit consent provenance for every list. Lead vendors that won’t or can’t produce per-number consent records for the RVM channel specifically are a hard pass. ‘They opted in to email’ is not consent to a voicemail.

Set a vendor accountability standard. If your RVM platform’s docs or sales reps still pitch the ‘not a call’ theory, treat it as a risk indicator and document the divergence.

For GTM and marketing-ops leaders, this is exactly the kind of risk that should live inside your lead lifecycle, not in legal’s inbox. TCPALitigatorList.com gives revenue teams a way to suppress known TCPA litigators and serial plaintiffs at the top of the funnel — before a number ever hits the dialer, the SMS platform, or a sales rep’s queue. Treat it the same way you treat email-deliverability hygiene: a quiet, automated check that keeps your pipeline from blowing up.

Strategic frame

The RVM channel doesn’t have to be removed from the GTM stack. It has to be repositioned. Used against an opted-in customer base with clean consent records, RVM is a legitimate retention channel. Used as a cold-prospecting workaround for inadequate lead consent, it’s a trillion-dollar-statute waiting to fire.

The NRS settlement and the GoHighLevel certification are the industry’s last polite warning. Treat RVM like a regulated channel, or remove it from the stack.

Sources

National Law Review: $6.5M NRS Ringless Voicemail Settlement
TCPAWorld: GoHighLevel Realtor Faces Massive RVM Exposure

For GTM and marketing-ops leaders running campaigns into Tennessee, the calendar just got tighter. Tennessee’s General Assembly passed HB 2408 and its companion SB 2659 unanimously, the Speaker signed off on April 30, 2026, and the bill was transmitted to Governor Bill Lee on May 7. If signed, it applies to conduct on or after July 1, 2026 — right in the middle of Q3 launch season.

This isn’t a federal TCPA story. This is a state regulator getting the keys to your dialer logs, your SMS platform, and your consent records. And it’s a preview of what’s coming in other states.

What GTM teams actually need to know

HB 2408 adds a new oversight layer on top of Tennessee’s existing telephone and text-solicitation framework. The practical effect is three things:

Reporting. Businesses running automated outbound campaigns will need to file periodic reports about their activity. That means your demand-gen team’s dialing volumes are about to become regulator-visible.

Recordkeeping. Consent provenance, opt-out events, and call/text logs will need to be retained in a form the state can review. Your CRM and your dialer have to actually agree with each other.

Solicitation limits. The bill tightens what you can do, when, and how often. Expect operational rules that overlap with but extend beyond the federal TCPA’s calling-hour, frequency, and consent baselines.

Why this is a GTM problem, not a legal problem

Marketing ops teams have spent two years building lifecycle programs assuming the federal TCPA is the ceiling. That assumption is now wrong in at least three states (Tennessee, New York, Mississippi), and the gap is widening as the FCC moves the other direction with its proposed rollback FNPRM.

The GTM cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. It looks like:

— A lifecycle automation that perfectly satisfies federal rules but trips a state reporting obligation you didn’t know existed.

— A nurture sequence that hits Tennessee numbers during a window the new state law restricts, even though it’s fine federally.

— A lead vendor with messy consent provenance that you can’t audit in time to file a clean state report.

None of these are catastrophic in isolation. All of them are expensive to retrofit after a regulator comes knocking.

The 30-day GTM action list

State-segment your outbound. If you don’t already report dialer and SMS volume by state in your marketing ops dashboard, add it this sprint. You can’t manage what you can’t see.

Map every lead source against state rules. Each form, partner, and inbound channel needs a documented consent path that holds up under state-level scrutiny, not just federal.

Get your vendors on side. Push your dialer, SMS, and lead-vendor contracts to explicitly cover state recordkeeping and production obligations. If they push back, that’s signal.

Build litigator suppression into the funnel. Reporting regimes mean every TCPA filing becomes a paper trail back to your funnel. The fewer known-plaintiff numbers in your dial list, the smaller the trail.

For GTM and marketing-ops leaders, this is exactly the kind of risk that should live inside your lead lifecycle, not in legal’s inbox. TCPALitigatorList.com gives revenue teams a way to suppress known TCPA litigators and serial plaintiffs at the top of the funnel — before a number ever hits the dialer, the SMS platform, or a sales rep’s queue. Treat it the same way you treat email-deliverability hygiene: a quiet, automated check that keeps your pipeline from blowing up.

The strategic read

Tennessee is a leading indicator. Federal TCPA enforcement is softening, but state-level enforcement is hardening fast — and the states are using the same playbook of reporting + recordkeeping + private rights of action. GTM teams that treat compliance as a 50-state patchwork rather than a single federal program will be the ones who keep growing through the next 18 months without unexpected legal drag.

July 1 is six weeks away. If Tennessee is in your sales territory, now is the time to put this on the marketing-ops roadmap.

Sources

TCPAWorld: Tennessee’s New Solicitation Oversight Law
National Law Review: Tennessee Adds Oversight Mechanism to Solicitation Framework

SiriusXM’s $28 million TCPA class action settlement reached its final approval hearing on May 11, 2026, capping a case that should be required reading for any GTM organization running an outbound calling motion. The headline is the dollar figure. The actionable insight is what the case reveals about how internal Do-Not-Call lists fail — and why those failures are increasingly a GTM ops problem, not just a legal one.

The case in one sentence

In Campbell v. SiriusXM Radio, Inc., a class of consumers alleged that SiriusXM continued to make telemarketing calls to people who were either on the National Do Not Call Registry or who had specifically asked SiriusXM to stop calling — over a window stretching from April 27, 2019 to October 31, 2025. The size of the class and the duration of the alleged violations point to a systemic operational failure, not isolated incidents.

Why this is a GTM problem

Most large companies don’t actively decide to call people who asked them to stop. The violations accumulate at the seams — the places where customer requests pass between teams, systems, and vendors. Those seams are exactly the places GTM ops typically owns. Specifically:

The opt-out → suppression handoff. A customer texts “STOP” or asks a CSM to remove them. Where does that signal go? In most stacks, it goes to a marketing automation tool or a CRM. Does it propagate to the outbound dialer, the SMS platform, the partner contact pipeline, the data warehouse used for upload to new acquisition campaigns? In most companies, the answer is “yes, partially, with lags.” That’s where Campbell-style cases originate.

The lifecycle marketing seam. A consumer opts out of marketing but stays a customer. Your retention motion fires up a re-engagement push. Whose responsibility is it to confirm the consumer didn’t opt out of all calling? This question is increasingly being litigated, and answer-by-default is starting to fail.

Acquired-data and partner-source contact. A consumer opted out three years ago. Your company acquires a new business unit, ingests its contact lists, and runs a campaign. The opted-out number isn’t on the new list’s suppression — but your master list still has the opt-out. Whose responsibility is it to enforce?

The GTM control plane

The companies that get this right treat their suppression infrastructure as a first-class GTM asset:

A single source-of-truth opt-out table, owned by GTM ops, that ingests opt-outs from every channel (web forms, SMS keywords, inbound calls, email link-clicks, partner-reported opt-outs, postal mail) within hours, not weeks. Outbound sending systems — dialer, SMS, email, partner-facing CDP — read from that table as a blocking check before any send. Migration and acquisition playbooks include a “merge suppression lists” step with reconciliation. Quarterly audits sample random opt-outs and verify zero outbound contact since the opt-out date.

Companies that don’t get this right typically discover the gap only when a plaintiff’s counsel runs the dataset analysis that produced Campbell.

The reputational layer

The brand cost of being a defendant in a case like this is real but often underestimated. The settlement website (sxmtcpasettlement.com) and accompanying claim form become high-traffic destinations for ex-customers, current customers, and prospects researching the brand. The narrative that “this company kept calling people who asked them to stop” surfaces in news coverage, social media, and search results — affecting acquisition and retention metrics in ways that show up in the dashboard but don’t get attributed to the underlying compliance failure.

If your demand-gen motion leans on outbound calling or SMS, a litigator-suppression layer belongs in your stack right next to your DNC scrub and consent-capture audit. Tools like TCPALitigatorList.com index numbers tied to known TCPA plaintiffs and serial filers; running your dialing lists through that file before you hand them off to SDRs or a dialer vendor is one of the lowest-friction risk controls a GTM team can deploy.

The action list for GTM leaders

Within 30 days: map every system that captures an opt-out and every system that initiates outbound contact, and confirm the data flow between them. Within 60 days: stand up a quarterly suppression audit using a random sample of opt-outs. Within 90 days: revise any partner or vendor agreement that involves outbound contact to mandate shared use of your suppression list. The companies that operationalize these basics are the ones whose growth motions look defensible 18 months from now; the ones that don’t are the next round of Campbell defendants.

Sources

Campbell v. SiriusXM Radio, Inc., No. 2:22-cv-2261 (C.D. Ill.); class settlement website (sxmtcpasettlement.com); reporting by Inside Radio, TopClassActions, and Cord Cutters News.

Every GTM leader running a channel motion, partner program, or distributed sales model needs to spend an afternoon with the eXp Realty TCPA case. In the first week of May 2026, a federal court in Washington denied eXp’s motion to stay Usanovic v. eXp Realty — a certified class action covering calls eXp agents made using third-party dialer software. The case is moving forward, on a record that already includes a finding that eXp can be directly liable for calls placed by its agents. For any company whose growth engine depends on people who don’t technically work for them, this is the framework that’s about to test your structure.

The structural problem the case exposes

The classic GTM design — corporate brand, distributed selling — assumes a clean line between principal and agent. The eXp ruling shows that line is much blurrier than most companies realize once you start looking at the actual operational relationship: did corporate provide the training? The lead lists? The CRM? The dialer? The script? Every “yes” tightens the principal-agent relationship and increases vicarious liability exposure.

This isn’t just a real estate problem. It’s a structural problem for any GTM motion that includes:

Channel partner programs where corporate provides leads or marketing automation. Franchise systems where corporate maintains a CRM or call center. Affiliate programs where corporate provides scripts or call recordings. SDR-as-a-service vendors where the brand is the customer’s, the people are someone else’s. Distributed insurance or financial services models where corporate runs the platform and the agents run the dialers.

What GTM should be auditing now

Three audits worth scheduling this quarter:

The lead-provisioning audit. Map every channel through which the people calling on your brand’s behalf get phone numbers. Identify which leads originated inside your systems versus which were sourced by the agent. For corporate-sourced leads, verify the consent record and the vendor’s documentation practices. The eXp court paid particular attention to the testimony of lead vendors who admitted they didn’t have consent — that pattern is not unique to real estate.

The technology-stack audit. Inventory every piece of dialing or messaging tech that touches an outbound contact made under your brand. For each: who pays, who configures, who governs compliance settings (rate limits, quiet hours, DNC scrubbing)? If corporate pays and corporate configures, corporate inherits the operational control that supports vicarious liability.

The training and policy audit. Pull every piece of compliance training you provide to agents or partners. The eXp case has surfaced that training material is double-edged: insufficient training is evidence of indifference, but robust training plus violations can actually support a defense if you’ve done the documentation work. Make sure the training is real, recurring, and tracked at the individual-agent level.

The reputational dimension

The other thing the eXp case underscores for GTM leaders is reputational. eXp already paid $26.9 million in a prior TCPA settlement. Usanovic is incremental on top of that, and the court has been increasingly explicit in its language about agent calling behavior. For brands whose marketing message is built around trust, customer-first, or any kind of integrity narrative, ongoing TCPA exposure is a slow-bleed brand problem in addition to a financial one.

If your demand-gen motion leans on outbound calling or SMS, a litigator-suppression layer belongs in your stack right next to your DNC scrub and consent-capture audit. Tools like TCPALitigatorList.com index numbers tied to known TCPA plaintiffs and serial filers; running your dialing lists through that file before you hand them off to SDRs or a dialer vendor is one of the lowest-friction risk controls a GTM team can deploy.

The strategic question

Every GTM leader running an agent-based motion should answer one question before this quarter ends: if a TCPA plaintiff sued us on a vicarious-liability theory tomorrow, which specific operational facts in our agent program would the court find most damning? Then either fix those facts or build the documentation that explains why they’re not what they appear to be. The companies that do this work proactively will be the ones whose growth motions survive the next wave of TCPA enforcement. The ones that don’t will be the next eXp.

Sources

TCPAWorld coverage of stay denial in Usanovic v. eXp Realty (May 1, 2026); National Law Review on direct-liability holding; prior $26.9M eXp TCPA settlement records.

If your demand-gen team buys leads — and if you’re running a B2C motion, you almost certainly do — a federal court ruling out of Tennessee this week deserves a slot on next Monday’s GTM standup. In Brockington v. Hume Health, LLC, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee refused to let a TCPA plaintiff stall summary judgment with a Rule 56(d) discovery request, paving the way for the defendant’s Facebook-lead consent defense to be decided on the existing record. For marketing ops leaders, this is the rare case where the right documentation upstream determines whether you’re a defendant for two weeks or two years.

The lead-gen consent stack just got more important

Hume Health’s defense isn’t novel: it argues the plaintiff clicked through a Facebook lead form, accepted the TCPA-style consent language above the submit button, and authorized the very calls she now claims were illegal. What’s new is that the court is willing to hear that defense early, before discovery has expanded into the seven-figure cost range that pressures most defendants to settle.

For GTM teams, the implication is direct: the asset that determines whether a TCPA suit becomes an expensive class action or a fast summary judgment dismissal is your lead-capture record. Not your CRM. Not your dialer logs. The raw form-submission artifact — with the disclosure text as rendered, the IP, the timestamp, and the link back to the source ad creative. Most marketing ops teams cannot produce that artifact on a per-number basis. Most are about to find out they need to.

What this means for the demand-gen funnel

Three places this ruling should hit your GTM playbook this quarter:

Lead vendor contracts. If your vendor’s data-retention policy lets them purge raw submission records after 90 or 180 days, you’re buying leads with a shelf life on your defense. TCPA suits routinely cover a four-year lookback. Negotiate for indefinite retention of consent artifacts on any lead you ingest, and a contractual right to retrieve them per-lead within 48 hours.

Disclosure copy. Lead forms still routinely bury TCPA consent language in fine print or below the submit button. After the Fifth Circuit’s earlier consent ruling and now Brockington‘s procedural posture, the consent disclosure language and its visual prominence at the moment of click are the single most-litigated facts in any TCPA case. Get legal review on every active landing-page variant — including the ones SEM and paid social are still running.

Funnel attribution. Your lead source tracking has to survive a deposition. If a plaintiff’s number routes through three vendors before hitting your CRM, you need each handoff documented. “We bought it from Vendor X” without the underlying Vendor X submission record is functionally useless as a defense.

The procedural signal matters more than the merits

The reason this ruling matters even though summary judgment hasn’t actually been decided yet is the message it sends to plaintiffs’ counsel about how Tennessee federal courts (and others watching) will handle Rule 56(d) requests. The professional-plaintiff playbook depends on extending discovery to make defense uneconomical. A court that requires plaintiffs to articulate specific facts they expect to find — rather than fishing expeditions — shifts the cost curve back toward defendants who actually have their paperwork in order.

For marketing leaders, the strategic takeaway is that pre-litigation hygiene now has a much higher ROI. The companies that win fast are the ones whose lead artifacts are clean, complete, and produceable. The companies that drag through discovery are the ones whose ops teams treated lead-capture data as a marketing analytics problem rather than a litigation evidence problem.

If your demand-gen motion leans on outbound calling or SMS, a litigator-suppression layer belongs in your stack right next to your DNC scrub and consent-capture audit. Tools like TCPALitigatorList.com index numbers tied to known TCPA plaintiffs and serial filers; running your dialing lists through that file before you hand them off to SDRs or a dialer vendor is one of the lowest-friction risk controls a GTM team can deploy.

The GTM action list

This week: pull a sample of 10 leads from each active source and try to produce the raw submission artifact. Next sprint: revise lead-vendor MSAs to include retention and retrieval SLAs for consent records. This quarter: get legal sign-off on every active lead-form disclosure variant. The teams that do this work now will look prescient in 18 months; the teams that don’t will be the case studies.

Sources

Brockington v. Hume Health, LLC, 3:25-cv-00161 (E.D. Tenn. May 11, 2026); National Law Review; PacerMonitor docket.