Received a Demand Letter from Apex Trial Law? What to Know

If a letter from Apex Trial Law has arrived, you have probably noticed two things straight away. It comes from California, and it talks about a California law you have never heard of, even though your business is in New York. Since July, six businesses have called my office with one of these letters. Here is what it is, what it is not, and what the first week should look like.

This is a pre-suit demand letter. Nothing has been filed. No judge has seen it, no clerk has stamped it, and there is no answer due in twenty-one days, whatever the letter says about twenty-one days.

The letters I have seen follow one of two scripts. In one, a named individual described as blind says he could not use your website with a screen reader. In the other, the individual is described as hearing impaired and the complaint is a video on your site without captions. Either way the letter says the person could not fully access your website, cites the Americans with Disabilities Act, and then does something the New York firms do not: it cites California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and says that damages are set by statute at $4,000 for every instance the person was blocked. It usually closes by saying the client has instructed the firm to file within twenty-one days, and it asks you to fix the site and to pay.

The Unruh Act is a California statute. Under it, a violation of the ADA is also a violation of California law, and California law attaches a dollar figure that the federal ADA does not. That $4,000 figure is what turns “make your website accessible” into “make your website accessible and pay us.”

Whether a California statute reaches a business with no office, no staff and no store in California is one of the first questions I look at, and it is not a settled one. California’s own courts have held that a website with no physical place behind it is not a place of public accommodation under either law. The venue where any case would actually be filed, and the law that venue applies, matter more than anything typed in the letter.

“They are in California, they will not come here.” Be careful with that

It is true that this firm’s home court is California, and the letters I have seen are built for California law. It is also true that they send a great many of them, and that some recipients hear nothing further after the deadline passes. That is not a reason to file the letter in a drawer. A letter that is ignored is a letter that has not been assessed, and if this one is the exception you will be starting from behind. Treat it as the opening move, not the whole game.

The deadline is theirs, not the court’s

Missing the date in the letter does not cause a default judgment, because there is no case. What it does is end the window in which this can be resolved cheaply and quietly. So do not panic at the date, and do not ignore it either. What matters is that a lawyer has looked at the letter and your site before it passes.

Do not call or email them yourself. Anything you say lands in a negotiation you have not prepared for, and an admission about your website is hard to take back. Let your lawyer make first contact.

Do not rely on an automated scan. These letters are themselves the product of automated scanning at scale; a clean result from a free checker on your end does not answer them. Automated tools catch a fraction of what these claims are built on, and I have never seen a scan end a matter.

Do not rush a fix and then announce it. Repairing your site is usually the right thing to do, for your customers and for the case. But the timing and the way it is documented affect your position. If the letter is about a video without captions, adding captions is easy; how and when you tell anyone you did it is not.

Do not throw the letter away. Preserve it, along with your website’s development records and anything you have from earlier accessibility work.

Does California law reach you at all? A New York shop with a storefront, a shopping cart and customers in California is in a different position from a New York service business that has never sold a thing west of the Hudson. The facts decide it, and they are the first thing I ask about.

Are you a “place of public accommodation”? Courts have divided over websites with no physical location behind them, and the answer differs between California and the federal courts here. Where any case would be filed is part of the answer.

Does fixing the site make the problem go away? Remediation matters to how a claim is valued and sometimes to whether it survives. The sequence matters, and so does the record you build while doing it. This is the single most common thing businesses get wrong on their own.

Settle or fight?

I do not have a house rule, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Some of these letters are worth resolving quickly, because a fix plus a modest payment is less than the cost of arguing. Others should not be paid at all, because the claim does not reach a New York business or would not survive where it would have to be filed, and paying simply marks you as a business that pays. What I will tell you is what I see on your particular letter, before you have committed to anything.