Well, the supreme court recently decided on a case where the plaintiff had absolutely no standing. This was the case where the website developer didn't want to make a website for a gay couple, even though she had never developed a website before and there was no gay couple. So sure, this person can probably sue successfully. All rules are out the window at this point.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Are you implying that this case, where businesses are in clear violation of the ADA (aka "the law", and were undoubtedly approached and asked to correct this before it escalated to a law suit) has as little standing as, is as frivolous as, or is comparable in any way at all, to a case where a bigot literally made up shit to try and game the system to set a bigoted precedent?
Eh?
I'm saying you can now sue even if you're not disabled. Just go for it.
No, don't, because frivolous law suits like the one you were comparing this to will only harm people making legit claims, who already have a hard enough time being taken seriously.
What case was this?
And where does it say she was not a web developer at the time?
So she was previously selling "design" services, just not specifically for weddings.
Article has a point, it's the governments job to enforce this stuff, especially since the person is just checking random websites to see if they mention something, and immediately suing them if it's missing information...
If they're doing this to raise awareness, it's working, but I can't tell from the article if that's their goal or they're just trying to amass money from settlements.
I can't see the Supreme Court ruling in the plaintiffs favor
Edit:
Found another article with more info
https://19thnews.org/2023/10/supreme-court-acheson-laufer-americans-with-disabilities-act/
She claims to not make money on this, but at least for ones in Cali the plaintiff can get 4k for each one. So I'm not sure if she means "haven't made a profit" instead of "never received payouts". She filed over 600 of these all over the country, I doubt she hasn't done one in Cali.
Also, apparently the defendant has to pay legal fees for the plantif, and her old lawyer got caught "grossly exaggerating hours worked" so that might be the motivation if there was also kickbacks.
Especially with how many she does, I'd imagine her lawyer didn't need a lot of time to file these. It's possible the lawyer would overbill X hours and then give her a cut.
Definitely seems like there might be something shady happening, since we already know her lawyer was being shady.
they’re just trying to amass money from settlements
5-4 Pod covered this on the linked episode. The discussion of the case starts around 51:20. But, no, there's no money to made here. The testers identify non-compliance and then the hotel gets sued. That almost always means the hotel settles to become compliant; they just fix the problem.
They also address the idea of it being government's job to enforce to enforce the ADA? How? Where do the resources come from? There's no money to be made here because the business just fixes the problem. It's purely a drain on government resources to enforce the ADA. But if testers can't sue for non-compliance then the effectiveness of the ADA plummets: it basically becomes an unenforceable law.
Granted, these aren't legal arguments. They're based on the reality of what happens and will happen if testers can't sue, should the Supreme Court decide that.
There's a simple protection against this sort of trolling: Comply with the ADA.
Get out your checkbook, hotels. Daddy Thomas needs a new yacht
It's strange reading about this. Once upon a time when I did insurance for hotels and motels there was a disabled lawyer who would file claims for hotels being out of ADA compliance.
He would travel all over and stay at random hotels in their handicap accessible room and proceed to measure everything. Door frame widths, toilet heights, diameter of the handlebars in the shower, the exact angle of the zero entry showers, height difference between outside and inside of the door. Everything.
Then he would fax us these 50pg+ claims requesting compensation for everything that wasn't exactly in compliance. Usually this was after attempting to shakedown the owner/manager of the hotel. We would file the claim with the company and send the info to the agent telling them to talk with their client and get the compliance issues fixed.
After a while we started to also get claims where hotels would refuse him service because they knew who he was. The agents were warning their clients about him.
Far as I know the companies never paid a dime and just referred him to the ADA and denied the claims. They never said it outright but they would have preferred the hotels just binned the claims in lieu of filing them but understood why they didn't.