Texas Court Rejects Common TCPA Add-On

If your business has been sued under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in Texas, you've probably seen it before: a plaintiff adds a claim alleging the company failed to obtain a Texas telephone solicitation registration certificate.

The allegation appears regularly, particularly in pro se demand letters and template TCPA complaints. The assumption is that if a company made a telemarketing call without registering, liability automatically follows.

But Chapter 302 says otherwise.

In Sutton v. Senior Life Insurance Co., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121582 (W.D. Tex. June 1, 2026), the Western District of Texas dismissed with prejudice a claim that an insurance company violated Texas Business & Commerce Code § 302.101 by making telephone solicitations without a registration certificate.

The plaintiff alleged that Senior Life made unsolicited calls advertising life insurance. While the court allowed the TCPA claim to proceed, it threw out the registration claim at the pleading stage because the statute expressly exempts licensed insurance companies when the transaction is governed by the Insurance Code.

The court noted that Senior Life was licensed to sell life insurance and that the plaintiff's own allegations established the call concerned life insurance products. That ended the analysis. The registration requirement simply did not apply.

Even more significant, the court dismissed the claim with prejudice, concluding that amendment would be futile because the statutory exemption foreclosed relief.

That is notable because registration claims are often pleaded as if Chapter 302 applies to every telemarketing call. It does not. The statute contains multiple exemptions, yet plaintiffs frequently skip that part of the analysis and treat the registration requirement as universal.

Sutton is one of the first decisions to squarely reject that approach on a motion to dismiss. For defendants facing Texas telemarketing claims, it is a useful reminder that not every alleged failure to register survives a straightforward reading of the statute.