In recent years, California has been the nation’s leader in disability access lawsuits against businesses. A local news report in 2014 found that just 31 plaintiffs had been responsible for more than half of the thousands of lawsuits in the prior ten years.
How could such a thing happen? In tandem with a few clever lawyers, a handful of disabled adventurers had been visiting businesses up and down the state, looking for small violations — anything from a handicapped parking spot painted a slightly wrong color blue (there is a specifically required color) to an incorrectly sized bathroom sink. Visit a business, find a violation, sue and demand a settlement (regardless of whether the business ends up fixing the problem). In most cases, there’s still no warning period in California for the business owner to make things right and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act before the business owner is faced with the choice of either incurring large legal expenses or being forced to pay thousands of dollars for a settlement.
Neighboring Arizona doesn’t lead the nation in this regard, and it isn’t about to start catching up to California. After recent severe problems with this same cottage lawsuit industry, the state legislature is acting to fix the problem.
State Attorney General Mark Brnovich this month filed a motion to place legal sanctions against the attorneys involved with a group called Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities, which last year suddenly filed 1,700 robo-signed lawsuits against small businesses using this same method. AID didn’t even bother to have handicapped individuals visit the victim-businesses. The attorneys involved used copy and paste to file hundreds of complaints about handicapped parking signage that was posted a few inches too low off the ground, and demanding settlements of up to $7,500.
A judge combined and dismissed all of the group’s lawsuits in February after Attorney General Mark Brnovich intervened on the defendants’ behalf. This month, he filed a motion to sanction the attorneys involved in the scheme, arguing that many of the claims in the copy-and-paste lawsuits are false and amount to a fraud on the court.
Meanwhile, the state House in Phoenix is moving to stop this from becoming a problem before it gets worse. It has just approved a bill that would give business owners 30 days to comply with disability access complaints. If building permits are required to address the problem, they’d have 30 days to create a plan to remedy the situation and 60 more days to fix them before a lawsuit is filed.
Democrats argued that this would only encourage businesses to wait until they get sued before providing proper handicapped access. House Speaker J.D. Mesnard rejected that idea. “Maybe you think there’ll be that rampant, flippant carelessness in the business community,” he told the Arizona Daily Star. “I seriously doubt it.”
Between the possibility that a small number of businesses might act irresponsibly before finally fixing their problem, and the possibility of unscrupulous trial lawyers coming to your town and using this form of extortion against every business with a legal street address, it’s hard to argue that the legislature hasn’t confronted the far more serious threat to the rule of law.
