Litigation · April 15, 2026

How to Respond to an ADA Demand Letter in the First 72 Hours

ADA demand letters have become a cottage industry. A single attorney in New York or California can generate thousands of them per year. If you run a small business with a customer-facing website or a physical storefront, getting one is no longer unusual. Here is what to do the day it arrives.

Hour 0–6: triage

• Read it once. Set it aside. The emotional reaction is the most expensive part of the first hour.
• Identify the deadline. Most letters give 30 days. Some give as few as 14. Note the calendar date and set reminders.
• Identify the claim. Is it a physical-accessibility complaint, a website complaint, or both? Is there a specific accommodation request or just a generalized demand for compliance?
• Identify the plaintiff and the attorney. A quick Google of the attorney's name reveals volume — a serial filer is very different from a one-off.

Hour 6–24: preserve and contain

• Do not "fix" anything yet. Seriously. Until your attorney advises you, keep the state of the site or property as it was when the complaint was made. Changing things mid-investigation complicates what you can say in a response.
• Screenshot your website. Full pages, on mobile and desktop, with the date stamp visible. Save to a folder with the case reference.
• Download your current HTML and asset bundle. If possible, pull an actual site archive so you can prove the state of the code on the date of the complaint.
• Pull physical-site photos. Entrances, parking, restrooms, aisles, counters. Date-stamped, captioned.
• Stop social-media posts that reference the demand letter, the plaintiff, or accessibility changes. Anything public becomes discoverable.

Hour 24–72: get professional help

• Retain an attorney experienced in ADA Title III litigation. This is not generalist work. An hour of specialized counsel is worth five hours of general-practice counsel.
• Engage an ADA consultant. In parallel, hire a CIAC-credentialed consultant to produce a written audit. The report becomes evidence of good-faith effort and scopes the actual remediation.
• Notify your insurance carrier. Many general liability policies cover ADA claims or offer a legal-defense rider. You typically have 30 days to notify or you waive the right.
• Do not call the plaintiff's attorney yourself. Anything you say becomes part of the record.

What the response usually looks like

A good-faith response, typically drafted by your attorney, includes:

1. An acknowledgment of receipt without admitting fault
2. A commitment to investigate the specific allegations
3. A timeline for the investigation (the consultant's audit)
4. A request for specifics the demand letter did not include (pages affected, assistive technology used, date of attempted access)

Most serial-plaintiff cases settle in the $5,000–$25,000 range plus some amount of remediation. Fighting on principle is expensive; remediating quickly is usually cheaper and more useful to your actual customers.

The worst things you can do in the first 72 hours

• Call the plaintiff directly to "work it out"
• Post a statement on social media
• Take down the website entirely (looks like destruction of evidence)
• Make a one-off "fix" that doesn't address the underlying compliance gap
• Ignore the deadline