If a letter from Equal Access Law Group PLLC has landed on your desk, you are probably doing what everyone does first: searching the firm’s name and finding almost nothing useful. There is no case number to look up, no docket to read, no court file. Just a letter, a deadline, and a demand for money.
Here is what that letter is, what it is not, and what the first week should look like.
You have not been sued
This is a pre-suit demand letter. Nothing has been filed against you. No judge has seen it, no clerk has stamped it, and there is no answer due in twenty-one days.
That is genuinely better than a lawsuit. It also means the deadline in the letter is the sender’s own, not a court’s, and that changes how you should think about it.
The letter will typically say that a named individual, described as blind or visually impaired, tried to use your website with a screen reader and was blocked. It will list a handful of technical barriers, often with a note that the list is illustrative rather than complete. It will claim a violation of Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And it will ask for two things: a commitment to fix the site by a fixed date, and a payment in exchange for a release and a confidentiality agreement. In the letters I have seen, no figure is named. That is deliberate. It invites you to open the negotiation.
“They only send letters, they don’t sue.” Be careful with that
You may be told this firm does not actually litigate. That is half right, and the half that is wrong could cost you.
Across the New York and New Jersey court filings my office tracks this year, roughly 1,800 accessibility cases with the plaintiff’s firm recorded, Equal Access Law Group does not appear once. Not one filed case. In this state, their play is the letter.
Nationally, the picture is different. Industry reporting has put the firm among the highest-volume ADA filers in the country, with dozens of suits in a single quarter. Their own letters say plainly that the settlement offer is withdrawn if they are forced to file.
So the honest answer is this: in New York they lead with a letter, and that is not the same as an empty threat. Treat it as the opening move, not the whole game.
The deadline is theirs, not the court’s
A letter will usually give you a few weeks to respond. Missing it 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.
What not to do in the first week
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. Almost every business owner who gets one of these letters runs their site through a free checker, sees a low error count, and concludes the claim is baseless. Automated tools catch a fraction of what these claims are built on. A clean scan is not a defense, and I have never seen one end a matter.
Do not rush a fix and then announce it. Repairing your site is usually the right thing to do, both for your customers and for the case. But the timing and the way it is documented affect your position, and doing it loudly before anyone has framed it can hand the other side a better argument than they had.
Do not throw the letter away. Preserve it, along with your website’s development records and anything you have from accessibility work. These letters routinely include a preservation demand, and destroying relevant records is its own problem.
The questions that actually decide these matters
Every business that calls me about one of these letters asks a version of the same three questions. None has a general answer. All three turn on your specific facts, which is exactly why a form response off the internet is worth nothing here.
Are you even a “place of public accommodation”? Courts have divided over websites with no physical location behind them. If your company is a foreign entity with no office, no staff and no store in the United States, that argument looks different than it does for a New York shop with a storefront and a shopping cart. The venue matters too, because the law here is not the law everywhere.
Does this plaintiff have standing? Judges in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York have taken a harder look in recent years at plaintiffs who bring many of these claims, asking whether the person genuinely intended to buy anything and genuinely intends to return. That analysis is fact-specific, and it is one of the first things I look at.
Does fixing the site make the problem go away? Remediation can matter a great deal to how a claim is valued, and in some circumstances to whether it survives at all. But 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 matters are worth resolving quickly, because the cost of the fix plus a modest payment is genuinely less than the cost of arguing. Others should not be paid at all, because the claim is weak on standing, on jurisdiction, or on the facts, and paying simply marks you as a business that pays. The decision turns on how strong the claim against you actually is, what remediating your site really costs, and whether you are likely to hear from the next firm in six months.
What I will tell you is what I see on your particular letter, before you have committed to anything.
Talk it through
I am Michael Samuel. I have practiced law in New York since 1993 and I have handled roughly a hundred ADA accessibility matters, most of them website cases, for the business on the receiving end. I know how these firms value a claim and where these matters settle, because I have been across the table from them.
If a letter from Equal Access Law Group, or from any firm making an accessibility demand, has arrived, the first call costs nothing and you will get a straight answer about where you stand. I handle website accessibility defense on a flat fee, quoted before you commit, so you know the number up front.
Recent decisions in these cases, with the courts and index numbers, are on my results page. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
The Samuel Law Firm, 1441 Broadway, Suite 6085, New York, NY 10018. Call 212-563-9884.
Attorney Advertising. This article is general information about New York law and is not legal advice about your situation. Reading it does not create an attorney client relationship.
