Florida trails only New York in the number of website access lawsuits filed under the American with Disabilities Act based on a study by Seyfarth Shaw.

But after explosive growth in the number of lawsuits filed in 2018, it appears the once-rising tide of litigation has leveled off, the study found.

In 2019, 2,256 ADA web access suits were filed in the nation's federal courts compared with just two more than that in 2018, according to Seyfarth labor and employment partners Minh Vu and Kristina Launey, who keep a tally of ADA lawsuits and blog about their findings.

The latest ADA blog post comparing the latest year-over-year data is titled "The Curve Has Flattened for Federal Website Accessibility Lawsuits."

For sure, 2019 saw plenty of new suits. But on a year-over-year basis, the number was flat, the blog authors said. By contrast, there was "an explosive 177% increase" from 814 in 2017.

But some things don't change. The New York federal court system remains the dominant place for new filings just as in recent years, the attorneys found. The Empire State saw 1,354 web access suits launched in 2019, down from 1,564 in 2018.

Meanwhile, Florida held steady with the second-highest tally with 526 cases lodged in 2019, down from 576 in 2018.

In a change for the distant third and fourth leaders, California at 120 and Pennsylvania at 92 moved past Illinois at 91 and Massachusetts at 33 in 2019 for those spots. At the same time, the number of website-accessibility actions for the four top states more than doubled year over year, Vu and Launey said.

Credit: Seyfarth Shaw

In other findings, the partners pointed to the lack of any surge in new cases after the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would not review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit's pro-plaintiff Robles v. Domino's decision on web access.

Vu and Launey noted they predicted no high court review of the Robles decision would lead to an increase in case filings. But thy were off. Before the Supreme Court's Oct. 7, 2019, refusal to hear the case, an average of seven lawsuits were filed a day. Afterward, an average of four a day were filed.

They also reported that "while the greatest number of suits were filed in July and August (258 and 270, respectively), monthly filings then decreased by nearly half for each of the last four months of the year."

In 2020 so far, they added, "The number of filings went back up for the first three months … but were still lower that the number of filings in the same months in 2019."

Over the last decade, the growing web access area of litigation — in which disabled people, citing the ADA, sue websites that allegedly aren't coded to work with assisting technologies such as screen readers — has generated controversy.

As the litigation grew rapidly over the last decade, some have publicly criticized what they see as a plaintiffs lawyer-driven glut of suits that seem mostly geared to collecting attorney fees, especially when some states impose seemingly low caps on amounts plaintiffs can recover.

But in a 2019 interview with the New York Law Journal, Joseph Mizrahi of Cohen & Mizrahi, a leading New York firm bringing web access suits, defended the need for litigation.

"We have many clients, and over the course of their lives they have visited many websites that they cannot access, and they want to enjoy the internet just like anybody else does," he said in the interview.

The ADA "allows for attorney fees. There is a lot of work that goes into preparing, litigating and monitoring compliance," Mizrahi said. "So which attorney is going to work for free?"