Get it right the first time – the problem with “temporary” obstructions

May 2, 2017 By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Mootness, ADA Policies Tags: ADA, ADA Policies, ADA remediation, mootness, Starbucks

Billy Joel had a major pop hit in 1977 with “Get it Right the First Time” from “The Stranger.” Forty years later Starbucks has proven just how true this is. In Crandall v. Starbucks Corp., 2017 WL 1246749 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 5, 2017) the Court reminded Starbucks and every other public accommodation that “get it right the next time” is not the same thing as getting it right the first time. In fact, it is the difference between winning and losing.

The issue of interest in Crandall v. Starbucks concerned access to a counter that was blocked by a point of sale display. This is not a first for Starbucks as we described a couple of years ago in POS Marketing and ADA Compliance – you can’t have it both ways. In the earlier Kalani v. Starbucks case the defense was that POS sales items were only temporary barriers because they could be easily removed. The Court disagreed because, in its view, the POS displays were intended to be permanent even though they could be moved.The displays at issue in Crandall were a standing display placed so close to the counter that it intruded into the required 36 inches of clearance as well as displays on the counter itself. Some time after the lawsuit was filed the standing display was moved out of the way and the counter displays were removed. This, according to Starbucks, eliminated the need for any relief and required a defense summary judgment.

The Court disagreed, noting that the changes were not structural or permanent because the displays at issue were easily movable. Equally important, there was no evidence that Starbucks had adopted any policy against on-counter displays or concerning the placement of merchandise displays. Because Starbucks could re-create the barriers to access at any time the case was not moot.

So far, so bad, but worse was coming. The Court found the existence of a violation at the time the plaintiff visited and on two later occasions was established as a matter of law, refused to credit Starbucks’ argument that its employees would always move the displays to a correct position, and granted summary judgment for the plaintiff. “Get it right the first time” and there’s no lawsuit at all. “Get it right the next time” and you’ll be paying the plaintiff’s attorneys fees while contemplating a permanent injunction. In cases involving things like displays that employees place and move, getting it right the first time means having a policy in place before there is a lawsuit that requires employees to maintain an accessible premises.*

As a final note, the court mentions in passing a theory of accessibility that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the ADA Standards but creates a significant stumbling block for businesses that trying to make their premises accessible. As a rule, accessibility means a 36 inch wide route to all the relevant parts of a store or restaurant. There is even a picture in the DOJ’s primer for small business:

Crandall v Starbucks includes a complaint that the required route was not 36 inches wide, but it seems the Court granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs because it was undisputed “that when there are customers in the store the displays make the path of travel too narrow.” Id. at *14. The Court also found that accessible routes might be blocked in the future based on the “absence of any policy preventing customers from moving chairs around to other tables in a manner that might block the path of travel.” In both cases the problem identified by the Court is not any structural feature of the restaurant, or even a problem with where the furniture was placed by the staff, but rather a problem with the conduct of other customers.

It isn’t difficult to imagine that in an informal space like a coffee house or bar customers will feel free to move chairs and even tables, and may congregate in areas that are part of an accessible route. The ADA prohibition on “discrimination” applies to the design and construction of public accommodations and the removal of “architectural barriers and communication barriers that are structural in nature.” It doesn’t say anything about regulating the behavior of other customers. Starbucks has not been afraid in the past to take cases to the Ninth Circuit, and it would be nice in this case to get a definitive rejection of the notion that businesses are required to regulate customer behavior in order to comply with the ADA. In the meantime, businesses that are crowded or are pushing the limits of accessibility should be be careful.

*In a ruling this week a Magistrate Judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania approved class certification for a lawsuit against Steak & Shake that appears to rest primarily on a failure to properly maintain its parking lots. Last year this time we blogged about a similar lawsuit against Cracker Barrel restaurants brought by the same law firm. Does the ADA Require a Compliance Policy? Every temporary barrier caused by a lack of maintenance can turn into a permanent injunction if the right policies are not in place before a lawsuit is filed.

ADA testing and ADA exploitation are not the same – the courts are getting it.

April 19, 2017 By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA - drive-by litigation, ADA - serial litigation, ADA Litigation Procedure

The broad sweep of ADA litigation history runs from early cases in which serial litigants (also known as “drive-by” litigants) were given the benefit of the doubt as crusaders for civil rights to more recent cases in which courts have found reasons to restrict this kind of abusive litigation. Many courts are awarding minimal attorneys fees on default judgment, imposing semi-objective standards for determining intent to return as an element of standing, and otherwise making it difficult for those who file for profit difficult to do so.

A decision out of the Western District of Texas goes a step further in being honest about the evaluation of serial litigants. In Deutsch v. Abijaoude, 2017 WL 913813, at *5 (W.D. Tex. Mar. 7, 2017) the Court writes:

And while there is no doubt that a “tester” plaintiff can have standing under the ADA, Betancourt, 735 F. Supp. 2d at 605, Deutsch is far from being a “tester.” He sued 385 business in 306 days (and those 306 days include all of the intervening Saturdays, Sundays and holidays when the courthouse was closed). He did not provide the businesses pre-suit notice or allow them to cure the deficient parking before suing, and his attorney demanded payment of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees before he would dismiss the suits, even when the problems were quickly remedied. See, e.g., Dkt. No. 6–1 in A–15–CV–1198 LY.

This is the kind of practical appraisal of a plaintiffs’ conduct in which courts must engage if the exploitation of the ADA for profit is to end. “Tester” standing was first recognized in only limited circumstances based on the right of racial minorities to be given truthful information, regardless of their intent to buy or rent. See, Havens Realty Corp. v Coleman, 455 U.S. 363, 102 S.Ct. 1114 (1981). In Havens the question whether a person was entitled to truthful information about a rental even if he did not intend to rent. The Court found that the word “person” in the relevant section of the Act embraced individuals who did not intend to rent, and so providing false information was a violation of the statute. The tester’s standing came from nothing more than the breadth of the word person and the very clear statutory prohibition against providing false information. Unfortunately, “testers have standing” was soon elevated to a principle of law applied without regard to the existence of a specific statutory harm. Instead testers were given standing based on the notion of dignitary harm suffered when a disabled individual merely sees violations of accessibility standards. See, Smith v. Pacific Properties and Development Corp., 358 F.3d 1097 (9^th Cir. 2004).

This dignitary harm is a legal fiction, and because it is fictional the courts have had to draw arbitrary lines to provide some minimal restraint on serial litigation. For example, a plaintiff has standing to sue with respect to violations he or she has never seen, but only if he or she has personally confronted at least one violation at the same premises. See the discussion in Brooke v. Clay Andro Peterson, 2016 WL 2851440 (C.D.Cal. May 13, 2016). Merely seeing pictures of a violation without personally visiting the premises is not enough, though it isn’t clear why the dignitary harm of confronting a violation in person is worse than seeing a picture or reading a reliable report. The distinction is arbitrary because the harm is fictional.

Deutsch points toward a more rational basis for finding that a disabled person has suffered harm; that is, was the person actually denied access to the premises. The purpose of the ADA and the disability provisions of the FHA was to make facilities accessible, not to make disabled individuals feel good about society’s efforts on their behalf. A drive-by litigant like Deutsch who never intended to get out of the car suffers no harm because, never desiring access, he was never denied it. The weight of authority goes against this idea, but the massive abuses of the ADA in Arizona and lesser abuses elsewhere may convince courts that the concrete, imminent harm required by the U.S. Constitution and by both the ADA and FHA can come only from a denial of access, not from merely feeling bad about seeing a barrier to access.

Trending now – the ADA covers some of the internet, maybe.

April 17, 2017 By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, ADA Web Access Tags: ADA Internet, ADA web, Winn-Dixie

I’m writing this brief blog just to let you know that we have some additional decisions on the ADA / Internet issue. Unfortunately they don’t tell us much. In Gil v Winn Dixie Stores, Inc., Case No. 16-23020 (SD Fla. March 15, 2017) Judge Scola adopted the reasoning in Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Target Corp., 452 F.Supp.2d 946, 949 (N.D. Cal. 2006), the earliest and most influential of the ADA / Internet decisions. In Gomez v. J. Lindbergh USA, LLC, Case No. 16-22966 (SD Fla. Oct. 18, 2016) Judge Williams adopted the same standard in finding that a complaint was sufficient to support a default judgment.

Those involved in ADA / internet lawsuits will also be interested in Hindel v. Husted, 2017 WL 432839, at *7 (S.D. Ohio Feb. 1, 2017). This is a Title II case, and for Title II entities there is no doubt that an accessible website is required. What stands out is the time the court gave the defendant to make its website accessible; just seven months. DOJ and other settlements in this area typically require compliance in 18 to 24 months. The explanation for the short time line probably lies in the procedural history of the case, but it is a reminder that courts unfamiliar with the complexity of WCAG 2.0 compliance may not understand why accessibility can take a good deal of time.

Finally, a non-internet case from Utah ties into the ongoing discussion of internet issues because it concerns a program that was not conducted from a physical space. J.H. by and through Holman v. Just for Kids, Inc., 2017 WL 1194213 (D. Utah Mar. 30, 2017) concerns a program for disabled adults that is conducted primarily from vans that take the participants to various activities. The plaintiff claimed her exclusion from the program violated the ADA. The Court, after a careful analysis of cases concerning whether a “public accommodation” must be a physical space sided with those courts so holding. Because the vans were not public accommodations the program itself was not a public accommodation subject to Title III.

The case is interesting with respect to issues concerning internet access because of the Court’s discussion of the physical places the program was related to. Notably, the Court was not impressed by the fact that the program had a physical headquarters, finding there was no relevant nexus between the physical headquarters and the program itself.

For those who are counting, the trend is toward adopting the rule in Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Target Corp., which found that web sites could be considered services of a brick and mortar store and would therefore be required to be accessible in the same way other services of such stores had to be accessible. With most of the decisions made at the pleading stage what we lack is a clear description of how closely a web site must be related to a physical store in order to be considered a service. One can imagine, for example, a retailer maintaining two websites, one of which provides information about store locations, hours, sales and the like, while another serves strictly as an online retailer like Amazon in order to avoid any requirement of accessibility. Would this change if the online offerings were in the same website as the store information? After all, the online sales are not a service of any store. The answers to questions like these remain unclear.

In the meantime, despite some favorable recent rulings, the safest course for any business is to begin work on website accessibility now in the hope that money can be devoted to better serving disabled customers instead of paying off the lawyers in the ADA litigation industry.

Victory and confusion in ADA internet litigation – what next?

March 29, 2017 By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA - drive-by litigation, ADA - serial litigation, ADA Internet, ADA Internet Web, Internet, Internet Accessibility

ADA defendants just won two significant victories concerning internet accessibility. In a March 20, 2017 decision in Robles v. Dominos Pizza LLC, Case No. 2:16-cv-06599, (C.D. Cal.) Judge Otero dismissed a claim concerning the accessibility of Dominos’ web site and mobile app based on a due process objection. The Court found that DOJ’s failure to issue regulations implicated the holding in United States v. AMC Entertainment, 549 F. 3d 760 (9th Cir. 2008) that a failure to give fair notice of what was required violated due process. In Gomez v. Bang & Olufsen America, Inc., Case No. 1:16-cv-23801 (S.D. Fla) Judge Lenard adopted a rule derived from earlier cases in the 11th and 9th Circuits that that a claim under the ADA exists if “a website’s inaccessibility impedes the plaintiff’s “access to a specific, physical, concrete space.” He then dismissed the complaint because the plaintiff failed to allege with sufficient specificity that his access to the brick and mortar stores had been impeded. The holding seems more restrictive than the case on which he relies, National Association of the Blind v. Target Corp., 452 F.Supp.2d 946, 956 (N.D. Cal. 2006), but the differences are not explored in the opinion.

A few weeks earlier one of the leading plaintiffs’ firms in the field of internet accessibility entered into an agreement not to sue banks in Texas as part of a settlement of a barratry case brought by a banking trade association, another victory that shows one way to deal with serial or “drive-by” lawsuits. The Texas legislature is also considering an anti-troll law that would make bad faith ADA demands a violation of the law. If such a law survived a preemption challenge it might also help eliminate such lawsuits.

Hooray! Or maybe not. The two district court decisions only have persuasive value with respect to other district courts, and Judge Lenard’s decision turns on a defect in pleading that could be cured by amendment. The Texas bank settlement is just that; a settlement, and it was based on procedural rather than substantive issues. Judge Otero’s decision will certainly act as a roadmap for those who want to mount a vigorous defense to the next ADA internet claim, but it rests on 9th Circuit case law that might not be accepted in other circuits and its reasoning has already been rejected in other districts. At the end of the day these decisions represent nothing but the ordinary ebb and flow of ADA decisions in which defendants win some and lose some and then usually settle.

The state of law, in the meantime, remains mixed. In the 9th Circuit and 11th Circuit a pure internet business is not covered by the ADA. In the 9th and 11th Circuits a business with a physical presence and a web presence may be subject to the auxiliary aids and services requirement of the ADA, but the needed connection between the website and the physical store remains largely undefined. Finally, in some courts and circuits it appears the ADA applies to every website, regardless of its relationship to physical store. Because internet business is at least national most potential defendants will find their liability depends on where they are sued.

Continuing to move toward website accessibility is the most prudent strategy for any business that can afford it. Smaller enterprises that find the cost prohibitive may choose for strategic reasons to wait until the software tools improve and costs go down, but even smaller businesses should take the handful of relatively cheap steps available to improve accessibility, including the provision of a toll-free customer assistance number like that provided by Dominos Pizza. Recent victories are nice, but until the Supreme Court rules on the ADA and internet the state of the law will remain confused, and litigation avoidance will be the best strategy.

Hamilton and the ADA – New technology and the same old waste of money

March 15, 2017 By Richard Hunt in Accessibility Litigation Trends, ADA Internet Web, ADA Movies, ADA Theaters Tags: Audio Description, Auxiliary Aids and Services, Closed Captioning, Hamilton the Musical, Lee Litigation Group, Scott Dinan

On January 23 the Lee Litigation Group and Scott Dinan, who frequently represent plaintiffs in ADA matters, filed suit against the producers, theater owners and others involved in the musical Hamilton. Their claim is that by failing to provide audio description* for their blind client the defendants violated the ADA. The Complaint, which can be read here, alleges both a violation of the general anti-discrimination provisions of the ADA and the specific requirement that public accommodations provide auxiliary aids. It points out, correctly, that in November of 2016 the Department of Justice issued regulations requiring audio description decoding equipment for movie theaters. Why not, it asks, require the same for theatrical productions? More

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