EIA Examines The Similarities And Differences Between PLG Damages Attorneys And The Hindi Firm’s Approach.

PLG Damage Attorneys — a Miramar, Florida firm — files dozens of TCPA quiet hours cases in California.

A Sudden Wave of Filings

For the better part of a year, a single Florida law firm has dominated TCPA “quiet hours” litigation against ecommerce brands. The Law Offices of Jibrael S. Hindi, operating out of Wilton Manors, Florida, and acting primarily through partner Gerald D. Lane, Jr., has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of cases and demand letters in this space — with our trackers historically attributing roughly 95% of TCPA quiet hours cases filed in federal courts to Hindi-affiliated counsel since the Hindi firm’s wave of TCPA quiet hours filings began in late 2024. That asymmetry has shaped how defendants and outside counsel think about quiet hours risk: it is, for practical purposes, one firm.

That assumption may now be changing. Beginning the week of April 20, 2026, a different plaintiffs’ firm has begun filing quiet hours class actions at scale. Across roughly two weeks (April 20 through May 5, 2026), PLG Damage Attorneys — a name that we have not been able to identify as previously appearing in any TCPA dockets — filed at least 40 federal class actions alleging quiet hours violations across all four U.S. District Courts in California.

The complaints follow a pattern: they are concentrated in California venues, often multiple cases filed by the same named plaintiff, and they are signed by a single attorney — Faythe Gutierrez.

Snapshot — PLG Damage Attorneys filings, April 20 – May 5, 2026

Source: Case list compiled May 6, 2026, of all federal TCPA quiet hours actions filed by PLG Damage Attorneys.

The Signing Attorney: Faythe Gutierrez

Every PLG complaint EIA has reviewed bears the signature of Faythe Gutierrez, Esq.  Her LinkedIn confirms the PLG affiliation, but only as of two months ago — and the role is remote.

Her substantive litigation background appears to be in a different area. Before joining PLG in March 2026, her LinkedIn lists the following progression: Associate Attorney at PFS Global (Oct 2023 – Feb 2025) in an in-house corporate role focused on trademark portfolio development, contracts, and business development; Knowledge Management Attorney at Potter Handy, LLP (Apr 2020 – Oct 2023), where her own description notes that in addition to legal-operations work she “served as co-counsel in mass arbitration cases representing misclassified workers, and successfully represented approximately 1,500 clients”; Trial Attorney at Kemper (Apr 2019 – Apr 2020), an insurance-defense role in the Los Angeles area; and an in-house Associate Attorney role at Earth Friendly Products (2016 – 2018) focused on trademarks, IP, real estate transactions, and brand management. She also currently holds a contract appointment as a Lecturer at Chapman University Fowler School of Law, teaching “Practice Foundations: Transactions and Fundamentals of In-House Corporate Practice” — a transactional and in-house-counsel curriculum, not consumer litigation. She has, in short, meaningful high-volume plaintiff-side experience from her Potter Handy years, but according to her description that experience is in wage-and-hour worker misclassification arbitrations, not in TCPA, telemarketing, or do-not-call cases. Based on her profile, her TCPA experience appears to have begun when she joined PLG role in March 2026.

The Broward Connection

Although PLG and the Hindi Firm are different firms, and Ms. Gutierrez is apparently in California, the firm’s both have their primary offices in Broward County, Florida. The same county that has produced more than 95% of the nation’s quiet hours TCPA litigation since November 2024 has now produced a second active filer using a similar model and a focus on filing cases in California instead of locally.

EIA takes no position on whether any relationship exists between the two firms and has no information suggesting one does. The more useful question for ecommerce defendants is whether additional firms are likely to enter this space. The public record so far reflects two independent firms in the same county pursuing similar strategies — putative class actions filed against nationwide ecommerce brands in California courts, with some overlap in the brands targeted (e.g., Fashion Nova, Gunner Gear LLC, Marathon Petroleum Company LP, Steven Madden, Ltd., and Urban Outfitters). Combined with Mr. Hindi’s public consulting program in which he has been encouraging other lawyers to start high volume TCPA practices, defendants should plan for the possibility that additional plaintiffs’ firms will adopt similar models. 

The Pleadings: Faythe Gutierrez Pleads Around What Gerald Lane Does Not

Despite the similarities, there are differences, however. From a legal perspective, those differences may prove to be even more important than the similarities.  The most consequential difference between the two firms’ campaigns is what they choose to plead. PLG’s complaints engage with — and try to plead around — the dispositive legal issues that the Hindi-firm complaints have systematically ignored.

As background for the discussion below, the FCC’s quiet hours rule, 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1), applies only to “telephone solicitations,” a term defined by Congress and mirrored in the FCC’s regulations to exclude calls or messages sent with prior express invitation or permission, sent to persons with whom the caller has an established business relationship (EBR), or sent by or on behalf of a tax-exempt nonprofit. See 47 U.S.C. 227(a)(4);47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(15). PLG’s complaints plead around these carve-outs explicitly; Lane’s complaints do not.

How PLG pleads quiet hours

PLG’s complaints — see, for example, Hughes v. Rite Aid (Case No. 2:26-cv-04436) and Hughes v. Gunner Gear (Case No. 2:26-cv-04439), both filed April 27, 2026 — does the following:

• Cites the FCC’s carve-outs by name. Complaints quote 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(15) verbatim: “the term does not include a call or message sent with prior express invitation or permission, to a person with whom the caller has an established business relationship, or by or on behalf of a tax-exempt nonprofit organization.”
• Affirmatively pleads the absence of any consent or EBR. Paragraphs 22–25 allege that the plaintiff did not provide “prior express invitation or permission — written or otherwise,” did not sign a written agreement, had no established business relationship within the meaning of 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(5) (“Plaintiff had not purchased from Defendant within the eighteen months preceding the challenged texts, had not made any inquiry or application regarding Defendant’s goods or services within the three months preceding the challenged texts”), and that the defendant is not a tax-exempt nonprofit.

The PLG complaint does not try to ignore the central role that prior invitation or permission and established business relationships play in determining whether a message actually constitutes a “telephone solicitation” to which the FCC’s quiet hours rule applies.[1]  Every one of those allegations is something the Hindi-firm complaints have omitted.  EIA believes this makes the cases filed by Gerald Lane frivolous on their face when filed on behalf of plaintiffs who consented to receive text messages from the brand or have an established business relationship.

How Gerald Lane of the Hindi Firm pleads quiet hours

On the question of consent, Lane’s complaints allege, in a single conclusory sentence: “Plaintiff never signed any type of authorization permitting or allowing Defendant to send them telephone solicitations before 8 am or after 9 pm.” (emphasis added).  The structure of that allegation is the fundamental defect in the Hindi-firm approach: it presupposes that, even where a recipient has provided prior express invitation or permission to receive marketing texts, that consent is ineffective unless it specifically references the 9:00 p.m.–8:00 a.m. window. The text of the rule does not impose any such requirement.

The quiet hours rule in 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1) applies only to “telephone solicitations” as defined in 47 U.S.C. 227(a)(4) and 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(15) — a definition that excludes calls and messages made with prior express invitation or permission, made to a person with whom the caller has an established business relationship, or made by or on behalf of a tax-exempt nonprofit. When the FCC extended the quiet hours rule to wireless numbers, it declined to adopt proposals that would have layered on a separate, time-of-day-specific consent requirement, leaving the definition of “telephone solicitation” undisturbed. In re Rules & Regulations Implementing the Tel. Consumer Prot. Act of 1991, 18 FCC Rcd. 14014, ¶ 210 (explicitly declining to require companies to adhere to consumers’ preferred “acceptable calling times” for callers who had obtained “express verifiable authorization” because “the costs of monitoring calling times for individual consumers could be substantial for many companies, particularly small businesses.”). Lane’s pleading therefore relies on a consent standard that is not in the rule and that the FCC refused to adopt.

Why the difference matters

This distinctly different approach matters for two independent reasons.

(1) PLG is trying to file complaints that survive a motion to dismiss. First, the lack of legal merit of the Hindi theory is well documented: a plaintiff who admittedly opted in to a brand’s SMS program is, on the face of the FCC’s definition, not the recipient of a “telephone solicitation,” and therefore the time-of-day rule in (c)(1) is not implicated. Hindi-firm complaints have repeatedly tried to elide that point through silence — pleading no facts about consent other than the conclusory “never signed any type of authorization permitting or allowing Defendant to send them telephone solicitations before 8 am or after 9 pm.” line. PLG, by contrast, does not try to invent an applicable legal standard and, instead, acknowledges the correct legal standard and pleads the issue head-on by alleging facts that, if true, would put the messages outside the consent and EBR safe harbors. (And, for PLG’s sake, I certainly hope the allegations they are pleading  to avoid the consent and EBR safe harbors are based on a good faith investigation.)

(2) PLG’s pleadings indicate that Lane’s theory is wrong. The same paragraphs that strengthen PLG’s complaints underscore the problem with the complaints that Lane and his colleagues have filed.  Prior express invitation or permission or an established business relationship defeat the claim, and there’s no duty to get more detailed consent related to the time of day. That is the legal proposition that the EIA has argued from the start of the campaign. The Hindi firm has refused to acknowledge it. PLG’s complaints quote it as black-letter regulation. Defendants facing both kinds of cases now have an affirmative statement embedded in PLG’s complaint, that the consent and EBR exceptions in 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(15) do what EIA says they do.

What This Means for Ecommerce Defendants

The arrival of a second filer changes the risk. For the past year, defense planning around quiet hours risk has been organized around one firm, one theory, and one geographic source. Three things now look different:

• The volume problem is no longer one-firm. PLG produced 40 federal complaints in a few weeks. If that pace continues, it would on its own roughly double the historical filing rate of the original Hindi-firm filings — without displacing the Hindi firm.
• Pleading-stage defenses must adapt. The Hindi-firm complaints are vulnerable on the face of the pleadings because they ignore the language of the TCPA and FCC’s rules enforcing the consent and EBR carve-outs. PLG’s complaints affirmatively allege facts negating those carve-outs. Defendants will need to be prepared to put record evidence — opt-in records, account history, last-purchase dates — in front of the court.  If PLG’s allegations are demonstrably false, Defendants should be prepared to pursue all recourse against PLG’s lawyers and the clients that they represent.
• PLG’s affirmative statements can be used. PLG’s template complaints contain a clear, on-the-record acknowledgement that prior express invitation or permission or an established business relationship defeat a quiet hours claim. Defense counsel handling Hindi-firm matters might want to consider whether to bring this distinction to the court’s attention when pursuing counterclaims against Mr. Lane’s clients. 

The EIA will continue to track PLG Damage Attorneys’ docket alongside Lane’s campaign and will continue to share its perspective on these issues.

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[1]. EIA believes there are other flaws in the PLG pleadings, however.  For example, in Hughes v. Gunner Gear complaint alleges that the messages at issue were sent on January 23, 2026 at 6:30 a.m. Pacific and April 19, 2026 at 8:33 a.m. Pacific, but then alleges in paragraph 30 that “each challenged message was initiated before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. local time.” However, 8:33 a.m. is not in the “quiet hours” window.

The PLG complaint’s legal analysis also appears to be flawed by attempting to raise the bar for what constitutes “prior invitation or permission” by asserting that consent is only valid if contained in a signed writing.  This argument is flawed because the quiet hours provision, 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1), contains no such requirement.  In King v. Bon Charge, No. 25-cv-00105-SB, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 267318 (D. Del. Dec. 30, 2025), the court dismissed plaintiff’s quiet-hours claim through a careful comparative analysis of the consent requirements applicable to the two distinct regulatory provisions at issue. The court noted that while both the Do-Not-Call Registry provision and the quiet-hours provision apply only to “telephone solicitations” the two provisions impose materially different consent standards. Specifically, the Do-Not-Call Registry provision at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(2) contains an express requirement that prior permission be “evidenced by a signed, written agreement” specifying the defendant and the telephone number to be contacted, whereas the quiet-hours provision at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(c)(1) contains no such language. In the absence of that heightened written-consent requirement, the general statutory definition of “express invitation or permission” governs, and that standard does not require a writing. Under that standard, express consent is established when an individual “knowingly releases” her phone number to the sender and the subsequent messages are “related to why the number was provided.”