Served With an ADA Lawsuit? How to Read the Complaint in 10 Minutes

Someone handed you a stack of papers, or you found them in the mail: a summons and a complaint, often 15 pages or more, with your business name on the first page. It reads like it was written for a judge, because it was.

Here’s the good news. Almost everything you need to plan your next move fits on one page: who is suing you, which law firm is behind it, what they say is wrong, what they want, and the date you have to answer by. That last one is the only item the complaint doesn’t spell out, and it’s the one that matters most.

You can find all of it yourself in about ten minutes with the guide below. Or you can let our free complaint checker read it for you in about a minute.

We built the checker for business owners who just got served and want answers before they’ve had a chance to call anyone. It’s free, and it takes three steps.

1. Upload the papers. One PDF, or up to 10 photos of the pages taken on your phone, in page order.
2. Read your summary. In about a minute you get a plain-English page: who is suing you, their law firm, what they claim, what they want, and the date to plan your response around.
3. Talk it through, free. If you want a lawyer’s view, book a free strategy session on the same page. Your papers come with your request, so you won’t have to explain the case twice.

It reads demand letters too, the letters some firms send before filing a lawsuit or instead of one. One thing you’ll notice: the checker asks when you were served. That’s not a formality. The section on deadlines below explains why the day the papers reached you can matter more than anything printed in them.

Your upload is stored privately and seen only by The Samuel Law Firm. The summary explains what your papers say. It isn’t legal advice, and using the checker doesn’t make you a client.

Check your papers now

Complaints in these cases follow the same structure almost every time. Read these six parts first and leave the rest for your lawyer.

1. The court and the case number (top of page 1). The box at the top, called the caption, names the court. “United States District Court, Southern District of New York” or “Eastern District” means federal court, and the number looks like 1:26-cv-01234. “Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Kings” means state court, and the number is called the Index No. Despite the name, the Supreme Court is New York’s main trial court. Which court you’re in decides which deadline rules apply.
2. Who is suing you (the caption, then the “Parties” paragraphs). You’ll see the plaintiff’s name and often the words “on behalf of himself and all others similarly situated.” That means the plaintiff wants to bring a class action. No class exists unless a court later approves one, and the phrase is standard in many of these complaints.
3. The law firm behind it (the last page). The signature block names the plaintiff’s lawyers. A small group of firms files a large share of these cases in New York, and each has its habits. We’ve written about Mizrahi Kroub, Gottlieb & Associates, Joseph & Norinsberg, Shaked Law Group and The Weitz Law Firm.
4. What they claim (the “Causes of Action” or “Counts”). Website complaints usually stack several laws: Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, plus the New York State Human Rights Law and the New York City Human Rights Law, sometimes the New York Civil Rights Law too. Here’s why that matters: the federal ADA can get the plaintiff an order to fix your site and their attorney’s fees, but no money damages. The money in New York cases comes from the state and city claims.
5. What they say went wrong (the “Facts” section). In a website case, this is a list of barriers the plaintiff says a screen reader ran into on your site: images with no description, buttons with no labels, a checkout they couldn’t finish, sometimes with the dates of their visits. Copy this list. It’s the starting point for your defense and for your fixes. If the case is about your building, this section describes the entrance, restroom or counter instead, and everything else reads the same.
6. What they want (the paragraph starting “WHEREFORE,” just before the signature). Lawyers call it the prayer for relief. Expect an order to change your website, damages under the state and city laws, and attorney’s fees and costs.

This is the part that catches most owners off guard. The complaint doesn’t give you a date. The summons, usually the first page or two, gives you a number of days, and the clock starts from when and how you were served.

• Federal court: generally 21 days after you were served. If you received a request to waive formal service and signed it, you usually get 60 days from the date the request was sent.
• New York State court: 20 days if the papers were handed to you personally in New York. 30 days if they reached you any other way, counted from the day service is complete.

The trap: many plaintiffs serve a corporation or LLC through the New York Secretary of State. Under state law, that service is complete the day the Secretary of State receives the papers, not the day the forwarded copy reaches you. If the address your company has on file with the state is out of date, the clock can run for days or weeks before the papers ever land on your desk.

The exact date is on the proof of service the plaintiff files with the court (in state court, the affidavit of service). A lawyer can pull it from the court’s online docket in a few minutes.

Miss the deadline and the plaintiff can ask the court for a default judgment, which means the case can be decided without your side being heard. Undoing a default is sometimes possible, but it’s harder and more expensive than answering on time. So write down two things today: the date you got the papers, and how they arrived (handed to you, left with an employee, by mail, or forwarded by the state).

A complaint is the plaintiff’s side of the story, written to sound airtight. These are the questions a defense lawyer asks that the complaint won’t answer for you.

Is this the same complaint filed against dozens of other businesses? Public court records show how many near-identical suits the same plaintiff and firm have filed. In Alexandria v. Just Shades, a case we defended in Manhattan this summer, the court dismissed the complaint in its entirety. The plaintiff had filed 54 near-identical lawsuits.

Does the plaintiff really plan to come back? To get a court order against your business, a plaintiff has to show a real intention to return. In 2022, in a case about braille gift cards, Calcano v. Swarovski, the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers New York, held that vague, boilerplate claims of intending to return weren’t enough. New York federal courts have applied it to website cases since. In Sumlin v. Royal Batch, another case we defended, a Manhattan state court found a serial plaintiff’s standing allegations inherently incredible and dismissed the complaint.

Does the ADA even reach your website? If you sell only online, with no physical store, some New York federal judges have ruled the ADA doesn’t cover your site. In December 2025, in Fernandez v. Gainful Health, a Manhattan federal judge dismissed the ADA claim against an online-only seller, while leaving the plaintiff free to bring the New York City claim in state court. Other judges in the same court have ruled the other way, and the Second Circuit hasn’t decided. It’s a real defense, not a guaranteed one.

Is your site already fixed, and can you prove it? Fixes made in the site’s code, documented with dates and re-tested, can weaken a claim and strengthen your hand in negotiation. A widget or overlay toolbar doesn’t do this. For the website itself, we work with Codexyo, an independent web accessibility team that fixes sites like yours. They are not lawyers, and you’re free to use anyone.

These same questions decide what a case costs if it settles. See how much it costs to settle an ADA website case.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

A demand letter is not a lawsuit. No court has set a deadline, and the date in the letter was chosen by the law firm that sent it. That gives you a little room, but not much: ignoring a letter is often how it turns into a filed case. Our guide to what to do in the first 48 hours walks through it, and the checker reads letters the same way it reads complaints.

Before you answer any letter, check that the lawyer who signed it is real. Lawyers admitted in New York can be looked up by name in the state court system’s attorney search, with their registration status. Out-of-state firms can be checked with their own state bar. A letter that names no dollar amount, gives you a few days to call, and comes from a firm no registry can confirm deserves a second look before you pick up the phone.

If your letter came from Equal Access Law Group or Apex Trial Law, we’ve written about both.