Overview
This page covers two situations: the letter already arrived, or you want to make sure it never does. The honest summary is that defense options are limited and expensive, and prevention is dramatically cheaper. That is not a sales line. It is the consensus of the defense bar.
Background on how these cases work is in Shopify ADA lawsuits: what store owners need to know.
If the letter already arrived
- Do not respond yourself. Anything you write can surface later in the case.
- Hire an ADA Title III defense lawyer. This is a specialized practice area with well-known playbooks. A general business lawyer will spend your money learning it.
- Preserve everything. Do not quietly swap themes or delete pages. Courts notice, and it looks like evidence tampering.
- Order an independent audit immediately. You need to know whether the complaint’s claims are true, and how deep the problems go. A real audit report becomes the factual backbone of your defense and your settlement negotiation.
- Start fixing. Demonstrated progress lowers settlement demands and supports a mootness argument. Courts have dismissed cases where the site was fixed and verified before trial.
Your realistic defense options
Settle early. The most common outcome, for the reasons covered in settlement amounts. Fast, bounded, confidential. Your lawyer negotiates the number down using your remediation progress as leverage.
Argue mootness. Fix everything, prove it with an independent audit, and move to dismiss because there is nothing left for the court to order. This works, but only with credible third-party verification. Your own developer saying “it’s fixed” carries little weight with a judge.
Fight standing or jurisdiction. Occasionally successful against serial plaintiffs who never intended to shop at your store. But dismissal fights are expensive, and a loss leaves you paying both sides’ enlarged fees. Domino’s spent years fighting and lost the appeal.
Prevention: the only cheap strategy
Serial filers pick targets by scanning for easy, demonstrable failures. Prevention means not being an easy demonstration:
- Run the 10-minute self-check to catch the loudest problems. Most complaints cite issues from the same short list.
- Fix checkout first. It is the flow every complaint describes, because a blocked purchase is the strongest fact a plaintiff can plead.
- Get a manual WCAG 2.1 AA audit and keep the dated report.
- Re-audit when your theme or apps change, so the paper trail stays current.
A dated audit report does two jobs. Before a lawsuit, it is evidence of good faith that makes you a less attractive target. After one, it is the document your lawyer builds the defense around. No other purchase in this space does both.
Example
Two stores receive similar demand letters in the same month. Store A has nothing on file: its lawyer starts from zero, the audit happens under deadline pressure, and the case settles at $22,000 plus fees. Store B has a nine-month-old audit report and a fix log: its lawyer responds with documentation, challenges the weakest claims, and settles at $7,500. Same complaint template, very different outcomes, and the difference was work Store B had already done for its own customers.
Common mistake
Installing an overlay widget as “lawsuit protection.” Overlay-equipped sites are sued constantly, and the FTC fined accessiBe $1 million in 2025 for claiming its widget made sites compliant. The full story is in overlay widgets don’t make you compliant.