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With great power comes great responsibility, and this certainly applies to auto dialers. They enable businesses to easily reach out to customers by phone, but there also is much room for abuse.

That’s why the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) strictly regulates auto dialing, and why there are a handful of cases regarding auto dial disputes each year.

A recent federal court case in Illinois helps further define the “do”s and “don’t”s specified by the TCPA.

In Modica v. Green Tree Servicing, LLC, the plaintiffs sued because the company was making automated telephone calls to a cell phone without prior express consent (a no-no under the TCPA). The suit failed, however, because it was found that click-to-call systems are not classified as auto dialers.

Green Tree used two methods to make outgoing calls. First it used a predictive dialing system. But it also used a custom-built user interface software that accessed the customer’s phone number that was stored on a server and required a human to “click” a dial option.

The system was ruled not to be an auto dialer because it required the agent to take the additional step of signing into the dialer, and this was not done by Green Tree agents.

The plaintiff argued that even though the agent was not logged into the dialer when the company made the “click” calls, agents had the capacity to log into the dialer from their computers and therefore had the capacity to auto-dial customer’s numbers.

Manually made calls do not have the “capacity” to be made from an auto-dialer just because the agent could theoretically sign on to the dialer, however, as an earlier court case ruled. So Green Tree won the case.

There are a couple of takeaways from this case.

First, follow the TCPA! Green Tree could have avoided this whole suit if it had not kept calling the plaintiff’s cell phone.

Second, the court found that the agent would not have had the capacity to make auto dialed calls without logging into the dialer. Not using the dialer makes the call not an auto-dialed call.