Congress Takes Aim at Opportunistic Class Action Litigation

​A quiet but costly wave of litigation has been building against American small businesses for nearly a decade, not over broken products, workplace injuries, or unsolicited marketing calls, but over the accessibility of their websites under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Fueled by a regulatory gap in the ADA and the entrepreneurial instincts of a small cadre of plaintiffs' attorneys, website accessibility lawsuits have become one of the fastest-growing litigation categories in the United States. In February 2026, Congress responded with the Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuits Act (H.R. 7328), a bill designed to curb what its supporters describe as exploitative "sue-and-settle" schemes targeting small business operators who are often unaware their websites fall short of accessibility standards.

The ADA and the Rise of the Drive-By Lawsuit

Like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the ADA was signed into law in 1990 on the eve of the commercial internet era. Wrapped in good intentions, the ADA was designed to eliminate discrimination against individuals with disabilities in physical places of public accommodation: restaurants, hotels, theaters, stores, and similar brick-and-mortar venues.

Drafted as it was in the pre-internet age, the statute did not contemplate websites, mobile applications, or the digital commerce economy that would emerge over the following three decades. As a result, Title III of the ADA, which prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, contains no explicit reference to websites or any technical standard for digital accessibility.

What it did contain, however, were several structural features that can make consumer law attorneys rich, including:

• Private enforcement plus injunctive relief. The ADA allows private individuals harmed by a violation to sue violators for injunctive relief and reasonable attorney’s fees, but no compensatory damages, which pushes cases toward fee‑driven resolutions.
  
• One‑way fee shifting. A prevailing plaintiff can recover attorneys’ fees and costs, but defendants generally cannot recover their fees even if they win, creating strong settlement pressure on businesses.
  
• No federal notice‑and‑cure requirement. The ADA does not require pre‑suit notice or a cure period, allowing plaintiffs to file immediately over minor or easily correctable barriers and leverage the cost of defense versus a relatively modest settlement.

Title III of the ADA took effect in January of 1992, and private ADA litigation started immediately thereafter and grew steadily through the 1990’s. By 2000, a new and disturbing phenomena began to emerge: the drive-by lawsuit.

Drive-by lawsuits describe a pattern of Title III cases where a small number of serial plaintiffs and their lawyers systematically search for easily documented technical accessibility violations in and around a business’s premises, often by literally driving past businesses or scanning them online—then file high‑volume suits or send demand letters to extract quick settlements, rather than to vindicate genuine attempts to patronize the business.

Typically, the plaintiff briefly visits (or only views) a property, documents minor issues like non-compliant signage, missing ramps, narrow doors, or an insufficient number of accessible parking spaces, and then sues or threatens suit without prior notice, relying on the business’s incentive to settle for several thousand dollars rather than incur the higher cost of litigating and remediating. And the incentive is strong: for many small business owners, the cost of litigating an ADA claim (and potentially paying the plaintiff’s fees, win or lose) far exceed a typical settlement, making quick payment the rational choice.

The ADA and its Application to the Internet

Unsurprisingly, the same lawyers who got rich suing family restaurants and small-town grocers for accessibility violations began wondering whether the ADA could be used to sue website operators for failing to ensure that their sites were accessible to those with visual or other impairments. To be clear, websites absolutely should be accessible, but in light of the money to be made, it’s safe to assume that a just cause was not the primary motivation here.

Without specific statutory or regulatory guidance, federal courts were left to decide whether and to what extent the ADA covers digital properties. The threshold question in every digital accessibility case is whether a particular website qualifies as a "place of public accommodation" subject to Title III. Courts have split on this issue, with some jurisdictions holding that a website must have a sufficient "nexus" to a physical place of business to be covered, and others finding that even stand-alone, online-only businesses are covered.

Even where courts agree that the ADA applies to a website, no clear federal technical standard has been formally codified for private sector entities under Title III. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), have emerged as the de facto benchmark courts routinely reference as the appropriate measure of compliance.

Explosive Growth in Filings

What began as a modest trickle of accessibility suits has rapidly grown into an industry. In 2024, over 4,000 lawsuits were filed in federal and state courts by individuals with visual, hearing, or other disabilities alleging that company websites and mobile applications failed to comply with Title III of the ADA. By 2025, the volume had surged further: over 5,100 federal ADA website accessibility cases were filed (a 37% year-over-year increase) and this figure does not include thousands of state-level filings, or demand letters resolved without litigation.

A Concentrated Litigation Machine

The data reveals that this wave of litigation is not the organic product of thousands of disabled individuals independently discovering inaccessible websites. It is, in large measure, the product of a highly organized and economically motivated legal enterprise.

Research by the Institute for Legal Reform found that a small group of just 18 plaintiffs' firms filed nearly 45,000 ADA lawsuits nationwide between 2009 and 2021representing 44% of all ADA case filings during that period. The most prolific single filer during that span accounted for over 13,000 filings. Overall, ADA lawsuits increased by 349% from 2013 to 2021, with more than 80% of cases brought by "high-volume plaintiffs," those who file at least eight lawsuits annually.

E-commerce businesses bear a disproportionate share of litigation risk, accounting for approximately 77% of all ADA website cases in 2025. Geographically, New York and California have historically dominated filings, with New York accounting for 31.6% and California 18.9% of federal cases in the first half of 2025, while Florida accounted for an additional 24.2%. Average settlements have climbed as the litigation matures, with out-of-court resolution averaging approximately $30,000 in 2025.

The Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuits Act

H.R. 7328, the Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuits Act, was introduced in the House of Representatives on February 3, 2026. The Bill amends the ADA by adding a new Title VI governing "consumer facing websites and mobile applications owned or operated by a private entity." Its core mechanism is a mandatory exhaustion-of-administrative-remedies requirement that must be satisfied before any civil lawsuit may be filed. The process works as follows:

1. Notice to the Business. Before any legal action, the aggrieved individual must first provide written notice to the owner or operator of the website or mobile application specifically identifying the accessibility deficiency.
   
2. 180-day Cure Window. Following receipt of the notice, the website owner or operator then has 180 days to bring the website into compliance.
   
3. Administrative Complaint Requirement. If, after 180 days, the owner or operator has failed to cure the identified deficiency, the individual must next file a complaint with the Attorney General, who then has up to 360 additional days to investigate before a private civil lawsuit may be commenced.

The cumulative effect of these procedural requirements is to create a potential waiting period of up to 540 days (180 days + 360 days) between initial notice and the filing of a lawsuit. Proponents of the Bill argue this gives good-faith business operators a meaningful and realistic window to achieve compliance, while simultaneously stripping the economic incentive for attorneys who depend on immediate litigation to generate quick settlements.

Those opposing the Bill have argued that requiring individuals with disabilities to personally identify and formally notify each non-compliant business effectively transforms them into unpaid compliance auditors and creates a structural incentive for businesses to adopt a "wait and see" approach to accessibility.

While the arguments for each side have a certain degree of merit, one thing is certain: if H.R. 7328 passes into law in its current form, it would certainly stem the tide of Title III online accessibility litigation.

What Happens Next

The Protecting Small Businesses from Predatory Website Lawsuits Act reflects a genuine and growing tension in American disability law. On one side stands the legitimate and important goal of ensuring that individuals with disabilities can access the digital economy on equal terms, a goal that the ADA's framers could not have fully anticipated but that courts and regulators have increasingly embraced.

On the other stands the undeniable reality that the absence of clear compliance standards, combined with the economic structure of Title III litigation, has created fertile ground for systematic lawsuit abuse that harms small businesses without meaningfully improving accessibility. H.R. 7328 is one attempt to resolve that tension. Whether it advances through the legislative process and whether it can do so without unduly burdening the rights of disabled users will depend on whether Congress can craft a notice-and-cure mechanism robust enough to deter litigation abuse while preserving genuine enforcement deterrence against businesses that simply ignore their legal obligations.