Congress tried and failed to reform the Americans with Disabilities Act. The moment there’s any serious discussion about reforms, Bob Dole or some other sympathetic figure comes down to lecture Congress that any limitation of the ADA means kicking people with wheelchairs down the stairs. Meanwhile there’s an entire roving culture of ‘testers’ looking to sue roadside cafes because they don’t have wheelchair ramps. And then there’s the whole question of websites that aren’t compliant with being browsed by the blind.
Federal fines start at $75,000 and go up to $150,0000. And lawyers use somebody in a wheelchair to find businesses to sue. And small businesses with small pockets are easy targets.
Palo Alto business owners are organizing against a law firm that has used the Americans with Disabilities Act to win thousands of lawsuits and millions of dollars from businesses across the state.
Leaders of the Bay Area Small Business Coalition say they’ve found an honest and affordable lawyer to defend their 50 members against the law firm Potter Handy, and he has already won small victories.
Wansek and Tai Pan owner Tony Han said in an interview yesterday that they started talking in 2021, after they were both sued by Scott Johnson, a wheelchair-bound attorney represented by Potter Handy. Potter Handy’s lawsuits follow a similar pattern. Johnson or another plaintiff claims he or she visited a business, and it wasn’t accessible for several reasons. Restaurants have been sued the most.
Usually, letters from law firms on the other side arrive in the mail around the same time, with promises to save the business money.
Johnson’s lawsuits in the summer of 2021 focused on outdoor dining tables that didn’t have enough room for his knees or toes, and he hit dozens of restaurants along University Avenue.
It’s past time to reform the ADA, but will the Supreme Court limit some of its destructive capacity?
The Supreme Court considered the strength of the Americans with Disabilities Act on Wednesday when it heard arguments in a dispute over whether a self-appointed “tester” of the civil rights law has the right to sue hotels over alleged violations of its provisions.
At the center of the dispute is Deborah Laufer, a disability rights advocate who has sued hundreds of hotels she has no intention of staying at, alleging they are not in compliance with ADA rules requiring hotels to disclose information about how accessible they are to individuals with disabilities.
Laufer, a Florida resident who uses a wheelchair and has a visual impairment, doesn’t intend to visit the hotels she’s suing. Instead, the complaints are made in an effort to force the hotels to update their websites to be in compliance with the law. Legal experts say the strategy, known as “testing,” is necessary to ensure enforcement of the historic law.
What it actually does is terrorize businesses.
A district court dismissed Laufer’s complaint against the company, ruling that because she never intended to visit the hotel and she didn’t suffer the type of injury needed to bring her case. But an appeals court later ruled in Laufer’s favor, saying that her lawsuit could proceed because she experienced an “informational injury” as a result of the hotel’s lack of accessibility information.
Laufer’s attorney, Kelsi Corkran, told the justices that her client suffered a “dignitary harm” when she saw that Acheson’s website didn’t provide information about the hotel’s accessibility, and charged that the company wanted the court to rewrite the law.
Laufer’s attorney, Kelsi Corkran, told the justices that her client suffered a “dignitary harm” when she saw that Acheson’s website didn’t provide information about the hotel’s accessibility, and charged that the company wanted the court to rewrite the law.
Dignitary harm. Informational injury. This is the absurdity we’re dealing with.
I’m not counting on the Supreme Court to fix this. For the same reason Congress didn’t. No one wants to hurt disabled people. And no one should harm disabled people. But these are clear and obvious abuses. And the ADA puts all the burden on small businesses using civil rights law as a model without considering how different the experience, the cost and the remedies are. At the very least, the Supreme Court could put a stop to the practice of people suing businesses they aren’t even patronizing. Is that too much to ask?