Courts Fighting Back: How Judges Scrutinize Serial ADA Website Plaintiffs in 2026

The Scale of Serial ADA Filing

In 2025, federal courts processed 8,667 ADA Title III lawsuits — and a disproportionate share came from a small number of serial filers. According to Seyfarth Shaw's annual analysis, the top 10 plaintiff law firms accounted for the majority of all federal ADA website lawsuits filed. Some individual plaintiffs have filed 50, 100, or even 200+ lawsuits in a single year.

The pattern is well-established: a plaintiff (or their attorney) identifies websites with accessibility barriers, files near-identical complaints against dozens of businesses, and either settles quickly for $3,000-$10,000 or moves to the next target. The complaints follow templates — sometimes so closely that details about one business appear in complaints against entirely different companies.

For legitimate accessibility advocacy, this creates a credibility problem. For businesses, it creates a financial burden even when the plaintiff never intended to use their services. And for courts, it clogs dockets with cases that may not represent genuine disputes.

Now, judges are starting to push back — and the results are reshaping the ADA litigation landscape in ways both plaintiffs and businesses need to understand.

Understanding Article III Standing

The constitutional foundation for challenging serial ADA filers rests on Article III standing — the requirement that a plaintiff must have a genuine stake in a case before a federal court can hear it. This isn't a technicality. It's the mechanism courts use to distinguish between someone who was actually harmed and someone manufacturing lawsuits for profit.

To establish standing, a plaintiff must demonstrate three elements:

The standing question is especially pointed for "tester" plaintiffs — individuals who visit websites specifically to identify barriers and file lawsuits, rather than to actually use the business's services. While the Supreme Court has recognized that testers can have standing in certain civil rights contexts (like fair housing), the application to ADA website cases remains contested and evolving.

The Cuddle Clones Ruling (February 2026)

On February 23, 2026, Judge Vargas of the Southern District of New York took an unusual step: he ordered jurisdictional discovery sua sponte — on his own initiative, without either party requesting it — in an ADA lawsuit against Cuddle Clones, a company that creates custom stuffed animal replicas of people's pets.

The facts of the case paint a stark picture of the serial filing problem. The plaintiff had filed 57 ADA lawsuits in total, with 22 filed in just 4 days across wildly varied businesses. The complaint against Cuddle Clones described their products as "pet toys" — a characterization that fundamentally misrepresents what the company sells. Cuddle Clones creates custom, hand-crafted replicas priced between $249 and $499 each, often commissioned as memorial pieces for deceased pets.

The "pet toys" description suggests a copy-paste approach to complaint drafting, where the plaintiff (or their counsel) barely researched the businesses they were suing. Judge Vargas apparently agreed — his decision to order discovery on standing without prompting from the defense signals deep skepticism about whether the plaintiff genuinely intended to purchase a $249-$499 custom pet replica from each of 57 different businesses.

The Cuddle Clones case doesn't mean the plaintiff's lawsuit will be dismissed — jurisdictional discovery could theoretically produce evidence supporting standing. But the judge's willingness to question standing without being asked creates a powerful precedent that other SDNY judges (and courts nationwide) may follow.

Laufer v. Acheson Hotels: The Supreme Court Warning

The Supreme Court case that nearly resolved the tester standing question was Laufer v. Acheson Hotels, decided in December 2023. Deborah Laufer, a disability rights advocate, had filed over 600 ADA lawsuits against hotels alleging their websites failed to identify accessible features as required by DOJ regulations.

Before the Court could rule on the standing question, Laufer voluntarily dismissed all her pending cases after her attorney was sanctioned for misconduct in an unrelated matter. The Court vacated the case as moot — but the concurrences spoke volumes about the justices' thinking.

The Laufer case didn't resolve the circuit split on tester standing, but it emboldened lower courts to apply stricter scrutiny. The Southern District of New York, in particular, has treated the concurrences as a roadmap for challenging serial filers — and the results are dramatic.

New York's Standing Crackdown: Filings Down 54%

The most dramatic evidence of judicial pushback comes from New York. According to Seyfarth Shaw's 2025 data, federal ADA Title III filings in New York dropped from their 2022 peak of 3,173 to 1,471 — a decline of 54%. New York, which had been the #1 filing jurisdiction for years, has fallen to #3 behind California (3,252) and Florida (1,823).

This decline isn't because accessibility got better in New York — it's because SDNY judges made filing there less profitable for serial plaintiffs. A series of rulings in 2023-2025 established increasingly strict standing requirements:

• •Requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate genuine intent to use the defendant's services, not just browse their website
• •Scrutinizing whether a plaintiff who filed 100+ lawsuits could credibly claim interest in each defendant's specific products
• •Granting motions to dismiss based on standing more frequently, especially when complaints contained copy-paste errors
• •Ordering discovery into plaintiff filing patterns, as in the Cuddle Clones case

The message from New York courts is clear: serial filing without genuine standing won't be tolerated. But as we'll see, this victory is geographically limited — plaintiffs haven't stopped filing. They've moved.

The Plaintiff Migration Pattern

When New York courts tightened standing requirements, serial ADA plaintiffs didn't retire — they relocated. The Seyfarth Shaw 2025 data reveals a clear migration pattern:

Illinois's 65% surge is particularly notable. Seyfarth Shaw attributes this to New York-based plaintiff attorneys migrating their operations to friendlier jurisdictions. Illinois state consumer protection laws provide additional causes of action beyond federal ADA claims, making it an attractive venue for plaintiffs seeking to combine federal and state law claims.

Florida's rise to #2 reflects a similar dynamic. Florida has a large population with disabilities, a plaintiff-friendly judicial climate in certain districts, and no state equivalent of the standing restrictions that SDNY judges have imposed. The Cox Media investigations into serial ADA filers targeting Jacksonville and Orlando businesses highlight how aggressive filing patterns have become in the state.

The bottom line: standing challenges in one jurisdiction don't reduce total filings — they redistribute them. This is why legislative solutions (discussed below) are gaining momentum, and why proactive compliance remains the only jurisdiction-proof defense.

The State Court Shift

Perhaps the most concerning adaptation by serial ADA plaintiffs is the shift from federal to state courts. Federal ADA Title III lawsuits are tracked by LexMachina and analyzed by firms like Seyfarth Shaw. State court filings are not — making the true volume of ADA litigation partially invisible.

State courts are attractive to serial filers for several reasons:

• •Relaxed standing requirements: Many state courts apply less rigorous standing analysis than federal courts, especially regarding Article III's "injury in fact" requirement.
• •State law claims: States like California (Unruh Civil Rights Act), New York (NY Human Rights Law), and Illinois (Consumer Fraud Act) provide independent causes of action with statutory damages — often $4,000-$75,000 per violation — that aren't available under federal ADA Title III.
• •Monetary damages: Federal ADA Title III only provides injunctive relief (fixing the problem) — not monetary damages. State laws that allow damages are far more lucrative for serial filers.
• •Less judicial scrutiny: State court judges handling high-volume dockets may not have the bandwidth to examine serial filing patterns the way specialized federal judges do.

The state court shift means that the 8,667 federal filings in 2025 represent only part of the total ADA litigation picture. Businesses in states with strong consumer protection statutes face dual exposure: federal ADA claims and state law claims, often filed simultaneously in state court.

Legislative Responses: States Fighting Back

Courts aren't the only institutions pushing back against serial ADA filing. State legislatures are increasingly introducing bills that aim to curb what they see as abusive litigation — though these efforts are controversial and face opposition from disability rights organizations.

Disability rights organizations like the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) oppose these measures, arguing that cure periods allow businesses to delay compliance indefinitely, fix one issue while leaving others unaddressed, and face no consequences for years of non-compliance. The debate highlights a genuine tension: serial filing is a real problem, but so is the lack of web accessibility for the 61 million Americans with disabilities.

For a comprehensive tracker of state reform legislation, see our Utah & Missouri Anti-ADA Lawsuit Bills analysis.

Standing Challenges as a Defense Strategy

If your business receives an ADA lawsuit from a serial filer, challenging standing is one potential defense strategy — but it comes with significant caveats.

The math often doesn't favor a standing challenge: spending $10,000-$25,000 on a motion to dismiss a case that might settle for $5,000-$8,000 only makes sense if you expect repeat filings or want to establish a precedent. For most businesses, the cost of making your website accessible is less than a single legal defense.

Why Proactive Compliance Beats Legal Defense

Standing challenges and legislative reforms are important developments, but they address the symptom (abusive litigation) rather than the cause (inaccessible websites). The most effective, cost-efficient strategy for any business is straightforward: fix your website before you get sued.

An accessible website is lawsuit-proof regardless of jurisdiction, regardless of standing rules, and regardless of whether the plaintiff is a serial filer or a genuine customer. It's also better for business — the CDC reports that 1 in 4 American adults has a disability, representing trillions of dollars in purchasing power.

Additionally, businesses that rely on accessibility overlays rather than code-level fixes remain vulnerable to both legitimate and serial ADA lawsuits. The FTC's $1 million fine against accessiBe in 2024 demonstrated that overlays don't provide meaningful compliance — and courts are increasingly treating overlay installation as evidence that a business knew about accessibility problems and chose an inadequate solution.

Business Playbook: Protecting Your Organization

Whether you're concerned about serial filers or genuine accessibility lawsuits, the protection strategy is the same. Here's a step-by-step approach:

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