The Missouri legislature yesterday sent a bill to curb website accessibility lawsuits against Missouri small businesses under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to Gov. Mike Kehoe’s (R-Mo.) for signature.
The lawsuits, often filed on behalf of a visually impaired plaintiff against small businesses with websites that fail to meet ADA standards, have led to settlements of up to $40,000.
The proposal, SB 907, known as the “Act Against Abusive Website Access Litigation,” would allow the state’s attorney general or targeted residents to challenge lawsuits suspected of being filed primarily for financial gain rather than accessibility improvements.
Under the measure, a claim would be considered abusive only if “the primary purpose of the litigation was to obtain a monetary settlement unrelated to improving accessibility or enforcing accessibility rights.”
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) made passage of this bill a legislative priority this year, with Missouri’s NFIB Director Brad Jones saying the issue first emerged with demand letters sent to businesses alleging ADA website violations and offering quick settlements.
“We’ve got some enterprising trial lawyers out there that are looking for websites that they think do not fall under ADA compliance,” Jones told host Alisa Nelson on last week’s edition of the Show Me Today radio show. “Which is an interesting thing, because there is no ADA compliance [guidelines] that is directly related to websites. […] They are not very specific about what it is that makes a website compliant.”
Jones said business owners are often surprised when they learn how the lawsuits operate.
“We had a trial lawyer in Kansas City who sent out 70 settlement letters,” Jones said on Show Me Today. “And basically, they said, you either fix your website, or we will sue you. They have one blind plaintiff for all of these settlement letters.”
NFIB ran a statewide radio ad campaign in support of SB 907, and Jones published a March 18 op-ed in the Kansas City Star, writing that Missouri small businesses shouldn’t have to “deal with the worst kind of shady shakedown.”
“Every week across Missouri, small business owners open their mail to find a letter from a lawyer they’ve never heard of, often from out of state. They learn their website allegedly violates the Americans with Disabilities Act,” wrote Jones. “The letter says they can either go to court, wasting time and money, or pay the lawyer a settlement.”
“There’s a name for this: shakedown,” he wrote. “And it only gets more ridiculous the more you learn.”
