How a small group of serial plaintiffs and their law firms turned a landmark civil rights law into a multimillion-dollar demand-letter machine — and why most of their targets have never met a disabled person.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed in 1990 to ensure that people with disabilities have equal access to public life. Title III of the ADA applies to "places of public accommodation" — stores, restaurants, hotels, theaters. When websites became the primary way people access businesses, courts began extending Title III to cover them too.
That's a reasonable interpretation. Blind users rely on screen readers. Deaf users need captions. People with motor disabilities need keyboard navigation. These are real needs, and accessible websites are genuinely better for everyone.
The problem is what happened to enforcement.
Unlike most civil rights law, the ADA has a quirk: plaintiffs can't collect compensatory damages for Title III violations. They can only get injunctive relief (forcing the business to fix the problem) and — here's the key — attorneys' fees.
A plaintiff firm doesn't need to prove you discriminated against anyone. They need to show your website failed an automated scan. Then they send a demand letter. The economics are simple: filing a federal lawsuit costs the firm a few thousand dollars. The average small business settles for $15,000–$50,000 to avoid litigation costs. If a firm files 500 cases a year and 80% settle, that's millions in fees with no trial.
The playbook, step by step:
Multiple analyses of federal court data have found the same thing: a tiny number of individuals are named as plaintiffs in thousands of cases. In 2024, fewer than 35 individuals accounted for more than half of all ADA website accessibility suits filed in federal court.
These aren't people who tried to visit a website, encountered a barrier, and sought legal recourse. Many have never visited the businesses they're suing. They exist as named plaintiffs in a mass filing operation, lending their names to complaints generated by law firms that recruit them specifically for this purpose.
In one notable case, a Southern District of New York judge called this practice "a shakedown scheme" and dismissed the complaint. But dismissals are rare — most businesses can't afford the legal fees to fight, so they settle.
Courts have been increasingly skeptical of mass-filed ADA website cases, even while upholding the underlying legal theory.
Multiple federal judges in the S.D.N.Y. and C.D. Cal. — the two districts where the majority of these suits are filed — have issued opinions criticizing the mass-filing model, describing cases as appearing designed to extract settlements rather than remedy actual barriers. Several have imposed sanctions on serial filers and called for rule changes. None of that has slowed the filing volume.
In 2022, the Honorable Gary Klausner (C.D. Cal.) wrote that courts have grown "deeply skeptical" of plaintiffs who file hundreds of near-identical complaints against businesses they have never patronized. The same year, multiple S.D.N.Y. judges raised standing concerns, questioning whether plaintiffs had any genuine intent to visit the websites they were suing over.
In 2024, the DOJ issued updated guidance clarifying that websites of entities covered by the ADA must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This was useful clarity — but it also gave plaintiff firms a cleaner legal basis to file. The guidance explicitly states that good-faith compliance efforts should be considered by courts in determining appropriate relief.
The irony is that predatory ADA litigation makes the web less accessible for disabled users, not more. When a small business receives a demand letter, the settlement money goes to the plaintiff's law firm — not to disability organizations, not to users who were actually harmed, not to funding accessibility improvements.
Meanwhile, the business has no money left to actually fix its website. And the plaintiff firm moves on to the next target. The cycle continues. A restaurant with broken form labels gets sued, settles for $20,000, can't afford a developer to fix the site, and gets sued again two years later.
Real disability rights organizations — the National Federation of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind, Disability Rights Advocates — have publicly criticized the mass-filing approach. Their concern: it generates backlash against accessibility requirements and distracts from cases involving genuine, systematic discrimination.
Courts do consider good-faith compliance efforts when assessing damages and granting injunctions. A business that can document ongoing accessibility work, timestamped scan results, and a remediation record has a meaningfully stronger legal position than one that simply received a demand letter with no prior effort.
This is exactly what Sturdly builds. Daily scans. A dated record of every violation found and every fix applied. A VPAT and accessibility statement. When a plaintiff firm sends a demand letter, you forward your audit trail. That's not a guarantee — but it's the closest thing to a defense that actually exists.
A free scan shows you exactly what plaintiff firms see when they run their tools against your site. Takes under 60 seconds. No signup required.
Not legal advice. Consult an attorney for your specific situation.
