John Ryan Discusses the State of Litigation and Compliance Involving the TCPA With Compliance Week

December 6, 2016

John Ryan — a Chicago-based partner in the Consumer Financial Services Practice at Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP — offered his insights on the state of litigation and compliance involving the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the article "For Whom the Ring Tolls: Companies Struggle With TCPA," published in Compliance Week on December 6, 2016. Says Ryan in the article, “At the time the law was passed, only a small percentage of Americans had cell phones[.] Now, if you fast forward, there are studies showing that 60 percent of people between the ages of 20 and 50 don’t have a home phone number. There are more restrictions on calling cell phones than a home landline. If a debt collector is calling a home landline, they do not need express consent to make that call; if they are calling on a cell phone, they need consent. Now, because cell phones are being used like landlines, they should probably be treated like landlines.” He adds, "[t]he more policies and procedures you have in place to prevent a TCPA claim, the more you will hopefully prevent a class from being certified[.] Unfortunately, there is no way to eliminate those individual claims, unless you want to manually dial and use artificial prerecorded voices and reduce your productivity by a thousand-fold.”

Read the article "For Whom the Ring Tolls: Companies Struggle With TCPA" on the Compliance Week website. (sub. req.)

Ryan handles matters involving consumer protection statutes and consumer class actions, including the TCPA. He has a strong research and writing background and has written numerous successful motions, including several that defeated large consumer class actions.

Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP is a U.S. based law firm with offices nationwide. The firm's national reputation spans the insurance industry, the financial services sector, and other highly regulated industries. Hinshaw also serves as counsel to the professional services sector, and provides business advisory and transactional services to clients of all sizes.