Just a brief note about another alleged abuse of the ADA. According to a press release from the Department of Justice an attorney living in Florida filed hundreds of lawsuits naming as plaintiff individuals whose identities he stole. You can read the press release at this link. If you take the nearly 1000 cases filed by Mr. Finkelstein and add them to the lawsuits filed by Oscar Rosales, Peter Strojnik Sr., and Scott Dinan it starts to become clear that a significant percentage of ADA Title III lawsuits are filed solely to enrich a lawyer and often without any substantive merit. While some commentators say the ADA needs to be scrapped, the real solution is simply to provide a procedure for early dismissal with minimum expenditure of defense attorneys’ fees. Some courts have instituted mandatory mediation programs with this goal, but in many cases the cost of mediation alone makes defense impractical. The real solution is simply a heightened standard for standing that requires plaintiffs to have suffered a real injury and a heightened standard for pleading that requires plaintiffs to identify specifically the ADA violations they claim to have encountered. With that and a program of referring every Title III complaint to a magistrate judge for examination (similar to the way most courts handle pro se complaints) abusive lawsuits could be substantially reduced. The goal is not to make it impossible for plaintiffs to file ADA lawsuits, but rather to limit such lawsuits to those who have suffered a real injury.
ADA and FHA Blogathon – tortoise and the hare edition
Being slow but steady the tortoise, as we all know, won the race. The picture on the left tells you the strategy I ended up using. In any case the news is current as of November 14, the last day I checked for new ADA and FHA decisions. There’s plenty of interest, as usual.
A pre-emptive strike on website accessibility succeeds.
The plaintiff in Expensify, Inc. v. White, 2019 WL 5295064 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 18, 2019) sought to take matters into its own hands and local court by suing a pair of serial website filers for a declaratory judgment that its website was not in violations of the ADA. The defendants almost immediately agreed to waive their claims, presumably because they did not want to litigate without the home field advantage they command in the Western District of Pennsylvania. The plaintiff was not content and tried to keep the case alive, but the Court found the waivers mooted its claims. The key finding is that there was a dispute justifying the complaint for declaratory relief. It is only a district court decision, but Defendants who receive a demand letter without a lawsuit should consider this kind of pre-emptive strike as a good way to avoid an unfriendly jurisdiction. More
Blogathon – not so quick hits on the ADA and FHA
The blog a day pace I thought I might hit hasn’t happened but I’m not giving up. Here is the first of several Quick Hits on recent ADA and FHA developments.
ADA standing – aiming to high leads to a crash and burn.
It appears the plaintiff in Rizzi v. Hilton Dom. Operating Co., Inc., 2019 WL 4744209 (E.D.N.Y. Sept. 30, 2019) decided to attack not one, but all of the websites operated by the defendant hotel company. Unfortunately, this meant the plaintiff could not identify any single website to which he plausibly intended to return. Litigation filed in the public interest rather than to alleviate an individual harm is the proper business of the Department of Justice, which has no similar limits on standing to sue. More
Blogathon – ADA and FHA cases with a little help from my friends.
There has been a lot of ADA and FHA news in the last 10 days, so in an effort to catch up I’m going to aim for a blog a day over the next few days. Today’s is dedicated to cases reported to me by colleagues and subscribers, some of which have not yet appeared in official court reports.
Standing is the Achilles heel of serial plaintiffs
Maximilian Travis of Muchmore & Associates PLLC in Brooklyn told me about a result that confirms what we all know – a serial plaintiff’s greatest weakness is standing. You can allege anything to get past a motion to dismiss, but when the truth don’t lie, as they say, the standing claims of most serial litigants won’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. That is no doubt why the plaintiff in Wu v. Jensen-Lewis, Case No. 1:17-cv-06534-34, (EDNY)* decided to voluntarily dismiss all her claims shortly before a status conference that would have likely required her deposition and browser history. This isn’t surprising – serial plaintiffs often lose on standing when they push through to trial. The fact that defendants have to spend a of money to win on an issue that deprives the court of jurisdiction is a weakness in the ADA as interpreted by the courts. More
Another ADA case heads to the Supreme Court – City of Trinidad v Hamer
I blogged about the 10th Circuit’s decision in Hamer v City of Trinidad earlier this year.* The City has now filed a Petition for Certiorari that may well take the case to the Supreme Court because the issues and conflict between the Circuits are well defined.**
The heart of the dispute concerns a novel doctrine invented by the Tenth Circuit, the “repeated violations doctrine.” Under this doctrine every Title II entity has an immediate obligation to fix every problem with accessibility everywhere, and its failure to do so constitutes a new ADA violation every day. The age of the facility doesn’t matter because the obligation is to fix things regardless of when they were built. A sidewalk built a century before passage of the ADA must be fixed in the same way a sidewalk built last week must be fixed. Other Circuits have refused to impose this kind of endless liability, tying the limitations period either to the when the facility was built or renovated or to the date the plaintiff first suffered an injury, and refusing to find a generalized obligation to fix things that did not violate the law when they were built. More