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Friday, September 12, 2008

Law - "Settlement Over Target's Web Site Marks a Win for ADA Plaintiffs"

Evan Hill of The Recorder published this story August 28th. It caught my eye at the time, but today there are several new ADA stories to go with it. From the Target story:

Resolving a lawsuit that caught the attention of online retailers across the United States, Target Corp. will pay out $6 million in damages and make its Web site fully accessible to blind customers as part of a class action settlement filed on Wednesday.

The National Federation of the Blind, which sued the Minneapolis-based corporation in 2006 in San Francisco federal court for maintaining a site that blind people said they couldn't use, will also be paid to oversee the changes and train the coders responsible for reprogramming the site.

The case will "send a message to the entire Internet industry that access for people with disabilities is not only good business sense but an absolutely legal civil right; it's mandatory," said Laurence Paradis, a lawyer at Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights Advocates who worked on the case. * * *

Blind people can use specialized keyboards as well as software that converts Web sites and documents into speech or Braille. But such technology won't work if a site is improperly coded, as the plaintiffs alleged about Target.com. The case pressed the legal question of whether the protections of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act could be extended to businesses' Web sites.

Paradis said Target fought the suit "tooth and nail" and that settlement negotiations broke down twice, first because the company wouldn't agree to fix the problems and second because the two sides couldn't agree on damages. Only after Northern District of California Judge Marilyn Hall Patel certified a state and national class in November 2007 was a settlement possible, he said.

See this background story from 2007, headed "Companies, Courts Debate Whether ADA Applies to Web Sites."

For more on the dispute, see this discussion in a Comuterworld blog.

The ABA Blog reports today that the Senate has passed a bill "to expand workplace protections for people with disabilities."

The bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said the Supreme Court had through a series of rulings interpreting the ADA cut down on protection for the disabled.

"The erosions of rights created by these court cases have created a bizarre Catch 22 where people with serious conditions like epilepsy or diabetes could be forced to choose between treating their conditions and forfeiting their protections under the ADA, or not treating their conditions and being protected," Harkin said.

Finally, the ABA Blog's Debra Cassens Weiss writes today under the headline "Ethics Complaint Says Lawyer Used ADA Suits to Extort Settlements." Some quotes:
A California lawyer who has filed hundreds of disability lawsuits against businesses has been accused in an ethics complaint of extorting quick cash settlements and making up injuries.

The state bar complaint against Bay-area lawyer Thomas Frankovich said he filed more than 200 lawsuits against businesses in 2004 alone that contended they were not accessible to the disabled, the Daily Journal reports (sub. req.). The plaintiff in most of the suits was Jarek Molski, who uses a wheelchair.

The state bar said Frankovich would wait as along as a year to file a complaint and then would seek damages of $4,000 a day for the period, the story says. After filing a complaint, he would send a letter to the defendant that “could be viewed as intimidating as well as inaccurate," the state bar says. The letter advised defendants they shouldn’t hire a lawyer, they had no defense to the complaint and they should quickly settle the case.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 12, 2008 01:31 PM
Posted to General Law Related