Florida is the third most litigious state when it comes to ADA website litigation.
And I’m on, I’m screen recording the Miami subreddit, and there’s a post and there’s a few replies to this post that I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention.
The post, the original poster writes, have you dealt with an ADA lawsuit? My aunt’s restaurant got served a few weeks ago. The lawsuit was a surprise and it has little details on what is actually non-compliant. After some initial research, this lawsuit appears to be a quote unquote drive by lawsuit.
Any recommendations on how to deal with this? Get a lawyer attempt to fix some ADA issues with the help of an expert and settle.
And then so people are saying, don’t settle without a lawyer. There’s a cottage industry in Miami for this. And then someone says, yes, my husband worked at a facility, the same thing happened. They know what they are doing and know who to target. Another person says, get a lawyer. And one person wrote, don’t do anything until you get a lawyer. This includes settling.
And then someone said, could also be the website as well as the physical location. Just an FYI.
Someone wrote, legal assistant at labor and employment firm here. We call these test plaintiffs. They basically spend their time looking for establishments that violate some sort of ADA law and sue them using the same attorneys, hire a lawyer and settle way cheaper than going to trial.
And someone else wrote, sadly, that is the cheapest option. A part of you will want to fight back, but it will cost way more. It happened to us last year.
There are people that literally live off of suing as many restaurants as possible for this. By the way, they sued us a second time for our website not being ADA compliant. So you’re going to, so make sure you cover all of your bases in the settlement.
And I will link to this Reddit thread below. But this is an interesting twist in that the plaintiff’s law firms that are targeting physical locations may also follow up with a subsequent complaint or demand letter for website accessibility.
So this is yet another way where you can be sued again and again. And it happens with lawsuits by themselves, but this is a new twist to this where it can happen with starting with the physical location and then continuing on into the website.
And I’m going to make another video where I talk about the minimum and expected costs when you’re dealing with litigation for website accessibility. But we’re looking at, you’re generally starting at $20,000 all in, and that’s on the lower end.
And so when we think about restaurants and other small businesses, that is not affordable. So the key is to prevent these, is to limit. If you get one, make sure it stops at one. Make sure that you don’t end up with multiple lawsuits.
But this is in Miami. Of course, Florida is a very litigious, third most litigious state in the United States. And small businesses are being hit extremely hard.
