Why Serial Litigator Screening Belongs in Your Outbound Stack
TCPA compliance is about protecting your business from lawsuits that can drain resources fast. One accidental call to the wrong person can cost you $500 at minimum. Land in a class action, and the math gets much uglier, much faster.
If you’re running outbound calling or SMS campaigns at any real scale, you’ve probably heard this before. But the numbers behind serial litigation are worth a closer look because they reveal what too many teams underestimate: a small group of plaintiffs drive a wildly disproportionate share of the risk. That’s exactly where TCPA tools like litigator screening earn their keep.
What is the TCPA, and Why Should Outbound Teams Care?
The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 (47 U.S.C. § 227) restricts telemarketing calls, SMS texts, and fax advertisements. It requires prior express consent before using automated systems or pre-recorded voices to contact consumers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforces these rules, which include the National Do-Not-Call (DNC) registry.
Violations can incur steep penalties, typically anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per call or text. Intent doesn’t shield you. Accidentally calling someone on the DNC list is still a violation, and SMS is covered right alongside voice calls. In the last year, there have been 1,349 TCPA lawsuits filed. Add in related statutes like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) actions and that number jumps to 4,880 total lawsuits.
Note: This post isn’t legal advice. Talk to your compliance counsel for guidance specific to your business.
A Small Group of Plaintiffs Drive Most of the Risk
Here’s where it gets interesting. Based on public court filing records (aggregated in a TCPA litigation tool I built, methodology included), 31% of TCPA litigators have been part of a lawsuit in the last four years, and 15% have been part of more than three. Since April 2024, 72 plaintiffs have filed 11 or more relevant lawsuits accounting for 1,715 cases. That’s 2.3% of litigators accounting for 26.3% of the lawsuits.
In other words, a tiny fraction of consumers file the overwhelming majority of cases. These serial litigators are identifiable. Since they appear in lawsuit filings repeatedly, their phone numbers can be flagged before your campaign ever dials them.
It’s also worth noting where the trend lines are moving. Comparing Q1 across 2024, 2025, and 2026, total TCPA cases filed year-to-date have trended down, but SMS lawsuits specifically have surged. Q1 2024 saw just 2 SMS lawsuits filed, and only 9 through all of 2024. In 2025, that number jumped to 228. Q1 2026 is down overall, though the reasons behind the dip aren’t entirely clear from the data alone.
SMS campaigns scale fast, and the legal exposure has scaled with them. If your team is running SMS campaigns alongside voice outreach, compliance checks need to cover both channels. (Disclaimer: a meaningful portion of cases in the underlying dataset are uncategorized, meaning it’s not always clear whether a case stemmed from voice or SMS. The broader pattern still holds. Both channels carry real risk, with SMS growing particularly quickly.)
How Do TCPA Tools Actually Reduce Your Exposure?
The most effective TCPA tools work by screening your contact lists against known litigator data before you ever make a call or send a text. This sits alongside your other compliance workflows as a specific defense against the plaintiffs most likely to file suit.
Phone validation itself addresses a related but distinct problem. It returns a Phone Activity Score, a line type (landline, mobile, fixed and non-fixed VoIP, etc.), and the number’s assigned carrier. That’s foundational data quality work, and it keeps your outbound efforts focused on real, reachable contacts. But validation alone doesn’t tell you whether a given number belongs to someone who has filed a dozen TCPA complaints.
Litigator screening fills that gap. It cross-references the numbers in your lead list against a maintained database of known serial litigators, flagging the ones worth removing from outbound campaigns before they become a problem.
Litigator Screening is a Safety Net, Not the Root Control
By the time a litigator database flags a number, the underlying problem of bad contact data has already made it into your funnel. Litigator screening is a valuable last-line defense, but it’s not the earliest point at which you could have caught the risk.
The earlier signal is a mismatch between the person who gave consent and the person you’re actually about to contact. When that happens, any consent tied to the previous subscriber is invalid, and calling the new owner can create TCPA liability regardless of your intent. Name-number mismatch detection is how you catch that scenario before it becomes a violation.
In practice, the strongest outbound compliance stacks layers these controls: real-time identity verification (i.e., is the number still tied to the consenting party?) as the proactive front line, and litigator screening as the safety net for the cases where the answer is a known repeat plaintiff.
Where Trestle’s Litigator Check Add-On Fits In
Trestle’s Litigator Check Add-On is an optional add-on for both our Real Contact API and our Phone Validation API. When enabled, the add-on flags phone numbers associated with known serial TCPA litigators and associated contacts as part of the same real-time API response you’re already using for verification and validation. Across Trestle’s customer base, the add-on typically flags around 1% of phone numbers as serial litigators.
For enterprise customers using Real Contact API, the same API call that runs litigator screening can also handle upstream identity verification. Real Contact API already returns contact grading and a Phone Activity Score, which helps surface the phone numbers likely to be disconnected before you even dial. Name Match Details adds another layer. Our Phone-to-Name Confidence Score, which is returned within the Name Match Details object, quantifies how strongly a phone number is associated with the name on the lead, giving you a signal for name-number mismatch detection at scale.
Real Contact API with Name Match Details helps catch wrong-party contact scenarios upstream, before they turn into consent failures. The Litigator Check Add-On extends that protection to cover downstream cases: numbers that might pass identity verification but belong to known serial plaintiffs. Both run in the same real-time response alongside the contactability and identity data signals you’re already pulling. One call, one workflow, richer output.
What to Look For in a TCPA Tool
If you’re evaluating TCPA tools, whether ours or someone else’s, a few things are worth weighing:
- Coverage across channels: Given the rise in SMS litigation, your screening should apply to texting campaigns, not just voice.
- Real-time API access: Batch screening once a quarter won’t protect you from a list you imported yesterday. Real-time checks at the point of contact (or at list ingestion) close that gap.
- Integration with existing validation: Litigator screening is more useful when it’s layered with phone validation or contact verification, so you’re catching multiple signals at once.
- Transparency on methodology: Ask how the litigator database is sourced, how often it’s updated, and what the false positive rate looks like.
For a deeper walkthrough of how the add-on works within an API response, check out this KB article.
Compliance is a Moving Target, but the Tools Keep Up
TCPA enforcement isn’t going anywhere. Even with Q1 2026 numbers trending down overall, the volume of lawsuits remains high, SMS exposure is growing, and a concentrated pool of serial litigators continues to drive the majority of filings. Staying compliant is the right thing to do for consumers, and it’s also a basic risk mitigation step for any business running outbound at scale.
Screening your lists for serial litigators is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make. It’s cheap relative to the downside, it runs in real-time alongside your existing identity data workflows, and it’s targeted at exactly the small group of plaintiffs driving most of the risk.
If you’re ready to see how Litigator Check Add-Ons fit into your outbound workflow, start your free trial or check out the API Documentation to get technical details on implementation.
