More than 11,000 Americans with Disabilities Act Title III—or private entity access—lawsuits were launched in the federal courts in 2019, setting a record for the number of Title III lawsuits lodged nationally in a year since the law firm Seyfarth Shaw began compiling the data about seven years ago.

New York state set its own statewide record with its number of suits, accounting for 2,635 of the 11,053 suits nationwide, Seyfarth reports. New York was second only to California's 4,794 Title III federal actions, which was a record yearly amount in the Golden State.

On the whole, California, New York and Florida continued to lead the nation, by far, in having the highest numbers of ADA Title III federal suits. The three states accounted for 84% of all the suits launched nationwide, according to Seyfarth data set out in a Feb. 20 blog post by Seyfarth labor and employment partners by Minh Vu and Kristina Launey, as well as by Seyfarth librarian Susan Ryan.

The Seyfarth data shows that each year the firm has collected the data, the number of Title III actions has risen nationally, jumping from 2,722 in 2013 to 11,053 in 2019.

Courtesy of Seyfarth Shaw

In their post, the law partners, who have led the ADA-suit data collection, and librarian Ryan write that the "record-breaking" 2019 numbers include Title III actions filed "on all grounds," including access to "physical facilities, websites and mobile applications, service animals, sign language interpreters, and more."

The Seyfarth figures, they note, don't include the "significant number of disability access lawsuits filed in state courts which are much more difficult to accurately track."

In a Jan. 6 Seyfarth blog post by Washington, D.C.-based partner Vu—in which she examined, in part, what types of Title III lawsuits are "trending now"—she pointed to, in one example, Braille gift card actions lodged in New York's busiest federal courts.

Since October 2019, she wrote, "more than a dozen blind plaintiffs represented by five attorneys have filed at least 243 lawsuits in the Southern and Eastern districts of New York alleging that retailers and other businesses have violated the ADA and New York state and city laws by failing to offer for sale gift cards that have all the information printed on the cards shown in Braille." She noted that the cases had been assigned to at least 29 different judges.

Among other trending types of Title III suits pointed to by Vu were website and mobile app accessibility lawsuits, hotel accessibility information on reservations websites, and the many inaccessible facilities suits that she wrote historically have been prolific.

Vu and her co-authors, in the more recent post on the 2019 statistics, explain that, to collect the data, the firm used "a painstaking manual process of going through all federal cases that were coded as 'ADA-Other' and manually culling out the ADA Title II cases in which the defendants are state and local governments."

They note that the "manual process means there is the small possibility of human error."