What Happens After You Are Sued: The ADA Lawsuit Process

Getting served with a lawsuit is different than getting a demand letter.

A demand letter is a warning shot, and from there, you have time and options before anything is filed in court. Once a complaint is actually filed and served, you’re inside the formal ADA lawsuit process with real deadlines, and missing one can cost you the case before you ever get to present it.

This is a plain walkthrough of what happens during each phase of an ADA Title III website accessibility lawsuit.

The ADA Lawsuit Process at a Glance

A More In-Depth Look at the Lawsuit Timeline

Now that you have an idea of what the ADA lawsuit process entails, let’s get into each part of the timeline in more detail.

Phase 1: You’ve been served

You’ve received not just a demand letter but an actual summons and complaint with your name on it. What many people get wrong is thinking the clock starts as soon as you hear about the lawsuit, but in fact, it starts on the date you were officially served, and every deadline after that date is counted.

Before you do anything else, read the complaint fully. Don’t just skim through it. Take note of every claim being made and be sure to keep the copy with the service date clearly visible. You also need to get it in front of an attorney who actually handles website accessibility cases specifically, not just ADA work in general. 

If you carry general liability insurance, it’s also worth a quick call to your broker. Coverage for this kind of claim is hit or miss, depending on the policy, but informing them is a good step to take.

Phase 2: The answer deadline

What catches a lot of business owners off guard is that you don’t get weeks to sit with this. You actually have a mere 21 days from the date of your summons to file an answer. The deadline only stretches to 60 days if you have agreed ahead of time to waive formal service. 

Either way, this is one of the strictest deadlines in the whole process, and by missing it, it allows the court to grant favor to the plaintiff.

Your ADA defense attorney will go through the complaint in detail and either admit it, deny it, or state that there isn’t enough information. Sometimes, instead of filing an answer right away, your attorney will file a motion to dismiss first, which is essentially arguing the lawsuit has a legal problem before it even gets to the facts. 

Phase 3: Mediation first

Not all courts handle these types of cases the same, and you might find yourself being pushed towards mediation first.

If you decide to go this route, both parties will sit down with a court-appointed mediator who specializes in ADA disputes to help you settle, while at the same time, saving you money by not going to court.

If mediation works, you will typically end up with a signed agreement clearly indicating what needs to be fixed and by when, and the case won’t need a judge to weigh in. If it does not work, the case will continue to move along through the normal proceedings.

Phase 4: Discovery

If a case doesn’t settle early through mediation, it moves into what’s called discovery, which is where both sides must gather evidence to build their case. 

For a website accessibility lawsuit, the following may be required:

• Documents about your site’s development history, any past accessibility work, analytics, and user complaint records.
• An actual technical audit, usually from an accessibility expert running both automated scans and manual tests, like screen readers and keyboard navigation.
• Written questions, called interrogatories, that each side has to answer under oath.
•  Depositions, where people sit down and answer questions on the record before anything reaches trial. (These are generally for the most controversial cases)

This is usually the point where proceedings actually start costing real money, and this is exactly why so many cases do not get this far. 

Phase 5: Settlements

A settlement isn’t really a single phase but rather something that can happen at almost any point, and realistically, most cases do end in a settlement rather than a trial. 

The reason for this is generally because defendants don’t have many strong legal defenses available, and once you add up attorneys’ fees on both sides, settling early is almost always cheaper than fighting it out. 

A typical settlement takes somewhere around 6 to 18 months from the day the complaint is filed to a signed agreement. Most of those agreements include a window of 90 to 180 days to actually get the site to WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 AA.

In addition to this, an ongoing monitoring period can run anywhere from 1 to 3 years, on top of covering the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees.

Stage 6: A surprising detail

Under the federal ADA, the person suing you can’t actually collect money damages from you personally. The only things a private plaintiff can get if they win are an order requiring you to fix the problem, known as injunctive relief, and their attorney’s fees.

That fee provision is really the whole reason attorney’s fees drive so much of the economics here, and it’s why so many settlements get described as covering “fees and costs” rather than “damages.”

That said, this only applies to the federal ADA itself. A good handful of states have their own laws in addition to this, and some of those do allow real damages.

Stage 7: Fixing it yourself

In a way, fixing the accessibility issues on your own, before a court makes you, could just end the case. Once the barriers are gone, there’s technically nothing left for a court to rule on, which lawyers call becoming moot, or irrelevant. 

But there’s something that catches people off guard, which is that fixing it yourself doesn’t automatically mean the plaintiff walks away without their fees. A plaintiff generally needs an actual judgment, settlement, or court order in their favor to be entitled to fees, and not just a business quietly fixing the problem on its own 

So whether to remediate fast, negotiate, or fight it out is a real strategic call, and it’s one worth making with your attorney rather than deciding it alone the moment you’re served.

Stage 8: Trials barely happen

Either party can ask the judge to rule without a full trial through what’s called a motion for summary judgment. This is to basically argue that there’s nothing left to actually dispute. 

In these cases, that usually comes down to whether the barriers were really there and whether they’ve since been fixed. But actual trials in ADA Title III website cases are rare. 

Between the lack of money damages on the table, the mootness issue above, and the sheer cost of litigating, almost everyone ends up settling long before a trial date ever gets set.

Stage 9: Do not ignore it

It’s tempting to think a lawsuit will just quietly go away if you don’t respond, but it won’t. What does happen is that it turns into a default judgment instead.

The plaintiff can ask the court to simply rule in their favor if you slide through the answer deadline and don’t do anything about it. This also means that the court will never hear your side of it. 

A default judgment isn’t limited to just fixing what the plaintiff wants, but can include their attorney’s fees and, again, due to some state laws, actual money damages. 

The safest move is always responding well before your deadline.

Stage 10: After judgment is set

If a case actually reaches a final judgment or an acknowledged default, either side generally has 30 days from the date that judgment is entered to file an appeal.

A few things can pause that deadline, such as a motion to ask the court to reconsider or amend its own judgment. If that happens, the 30 days don’t start running until the court rules on that motion.

What Happens After the Case is Closed?

Even once a case is settled or a judgment is entered, you’re usually not done.

Most settlements and consent decrees come with a monitoring period. These periods often last between 1 and 3 years, and it’s during this time that you have to keep proving you’re still compliant through regular scans or reports. 

This is exactly where having a real paper trail pays off.  A documented history of scans and fixes makes ongoing reporting so much easier than scrambling to reconstruct everything after the fact, and it’s usually exactly what a settlement agreement will ask you to produce anyway.

This is one of the main reasons we created Compliance Vault™.

Frequently Asked Questions