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Smith v. LoanMe is the California Supreme Court's definitive ruling on cell phone recording. Before this decision, there was debate about whether § 632.7's lack of a "confidential communication" requirement was intentional or an oversight. The Supreme Court ruled it was intentional: recording ANY cell phone call without consent is illegal, period. This ruling massively expanded CIPA liability for telemarketers because nearly all outbound calls now go to cell phones. The $5,000 per violation statutory damages under § 637.2 apply to every unauthorized recording. Post-Smith, CIPA cell phone recording claims have become the dominant theory in California telemarketing class actions.

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Duguid is the most consequential TCPA ruling in the statute's history. The Supreme Court unanimously narrowed the ATDS definition, eliminating the expansive Marks interpretation that had driven thousands of class actions in the Ninth Circuit. For California-specific compliance, Duguid's impact is significant but incomplete: (1) TCPA ATDS claims are now harder to bring for systems that dial from stored lists; (2) BUT California's ADAD statute (Pub. Util. Code §§ 2871-2876) has its own definition that captures prerecorded message delivery from stored numbers; (3) CIPA claims for unauthorized recording are entirely independent of ATDS analysis. Post-Duguid California telemarketing litigation has shifted from TCPA ATDS claims toward CIPA recording claims and state ADAD violations.

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The Narayan settlement is the nuclear warning shot for any company recording calls with California consumers. $50 million — from a single class action over unauthorized call recording. The case demonstrated that CIPA's $5,000 per violation damages, applied across a large class of recorded calls, can produce existential liability. The settlement forced industry-wide re-examination of call recording practices. Every company with a call center that contacts California consumers must have verifiable, affirmative all-party consent before the recording begins.

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The Realogy/Anywhere Real Estate settlement illustrates the liability exposure for real estate companies relying on third-party lead generation with bundled consent. $20 million settlement — and this was before the FCC one-to-one consent rule took effect. The case is a warning for every REI wholesaling and real estate operation: leads purchased from aggregators where "consent" was obtained for multiple companies simultaneously are legally unusable for automated outreach. The FCC rule codified what this case already demonstrated through litigation.

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The $29.5 million Citibank settlement highlights the reassigned number problem — a persistent risk for high-volume callers. Phone numbers get reassigned to new people, and calling those new subscribers without consent is a TCPA violation regardless of whether the previous subscriber consented. For California-specific compliance, this case adds CIPA exposure on top: if those calls were also recorded without consent from the new subscriber, that is a separate $5,000 per violation CIPA claim. Number reassignment + call recording = compounding California liability.

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Marks was the Ninth Circuit's landmark pre-Duguid ruling adopting the broadest interpretation of ATDS. It created a circuit split with the Third and D.C. Circuits and was effectively overruled by the Supreme Court in Facebook v. Duguid (2021), which required random or sequential number generation. However, Marks remains important for California practitioners because: (1) it demonstrates how aggressively the 9th Circuit interpreted TCPA before Duguid, (2) California's ADAD statute independently captures many devices Marks would have covered, and (3) state-law CIPA claims are unaffected by the ATDS definition.

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California Supreme Court preserved right to seek public injunctive relief in TCPA cases despite arbitration clauses.