There’s a new kid on the block in the world of serial accessibility demands.** It’s not a boy band, its “Legal Justice Advocates.” They’ve been sending demand letters to apartment owners, mortgage lenders and real estate agents claiming to represent an outfit called “Victims Awareness, Inc.” which, they claim, is a “national not-for-profit” with disabled members “throughout the nation.” Victims Awareness, Inc., they claim, uses experienced testers (who are not claimed to be disabled) to check on the accessibility of websites. The firm then sends a demand requiring remediation of unspecified defects and money for the lawyers. After seeing a few of these and getting calls from lawyers who saw more I thought it would be worthwhile to take a longer look at the firm and its supposed client. More
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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
Hunt quoted on ADA website litigation in the Monterey Herald
Yes, I’m briefly tooting my own horn because James Herrera of the Monterey Herald interviewed and quoted me in his article “Making Business Websites ADA Compliant.” He did a good job of explaining the situation that businesses find themselves in, so the article is worth reading for reasons beyond searching for my name, which is of course the first thing I did.
Hunt quoted in Law 360 article on ADA issues for sports arenas
I do like to toot my own horn from time to time. I was among several ADA experts quoted in an article by Zachery Zagger on stadium line-of-sight problems under the ADA that was published by Law 360 on July 3, 2019. These cases figure prominently in the Auer deference issues for Title III of the ADA that I hope to blog on soon. See, MLB Parks Face Costly Fixes As ADA Suits Target Sightlines.
Quick Hits – Tax Day Edition
A third of the reported ADA and FHA decisions in the last three weeks involved a single plaintiff, Scott Johnson. Mr. Johnson’s name is often found in this blog because he has been a fertile source of decisions on a wide range of ADA issues. As discussed below, outrage is one common response to his lawsuits.
Outside the courts my ADA news feed delivers two kinds of articles for the most part. One kind complains about serial filers and their impact on local businesses. The other complains about the lack of accessibility in public accommodations and governmental entities. Neither seems to ask the big question that I have asked for years: Can’t we find some better way to increase accessibility than wasteful private litigation? The present system is a failure, as evidenced by the fact that decades after passage of the ADA private lawsuits continue to increase in number. Nonetheless, the two sides of the serial litigation issue seem stuck on a fruitless debate about the morality of serial filing instead of trying to address the possibility of a genuinely effective system of enforcement. And with that sermon behind us, here are your tax day cases. More