accessibility glossary

Serial Plaintiff (ADA Litigation)

A serial plaintiff, in ADA litigation, is an individual (often working with a small number of law firms) who has filed a large number of similar accessibility lawsuits against different businesses.

Courts and commentators have used this term, sometimes critically, to describe cases where a plaintiff appears to file complaints in volume as part of a repeated pattern rather than in response to a genuinely intended visit or purchase, and some courts have scrutinized standing in these cases more closely as a result.

Regardless of a given plaintiff’s individual circumstances, the underlying accessibility barriers described in these suits are frequently real and verifiable; the volume of filings reflects how common genuine WCAG failures still are across the web, not that the barriers themselves are typically fabricated.

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