Seyfarth Synopsis: A recent Second Circuit decision
holds that a plaintiff's encounter with an alleged legal
violation on a website, without more, does not give that plaintiff
standing to sue under Title III of the ADA.
New York federal courts have been inundated with website
accessibility lawsuits in recent years and continued to lead the country with 2,074 cases filed
in 2021. By comparison, California came in at a distant
second with only 359 filings for the same period. Most of
these 2,000+ New York lawsuits have been filed by a relatively
small number of firms on behalf of blind plaintiffs who make vague
and conclusory allegations about how they could not access the
goods and services on dozens, if not hundreds of websites. Usually,
these boilerplate complaints contain no information about what
goods and services the plaintiffs actually wanted to access or why
they needed these goods and services.
