Sued over your website? Read your own docket in ten minutes.

A plain-English guide for defendants. Verify everything yourself, on official systems, before you trust anyone — including me.

If you've learned — from a process server, a letter, or an email like mine — that your business has been named in a federal ADA website lawsuit, the single most grounding thing you can do is read the public record yourself. It takes ten minutes and costs at most a few cents.

Step 1 — Find the case

  1. Official route: pacer.gov is the federal judiciary's records system. Create a free account, open the Case Locator, and search your business name. Searches bill about ten cents a page, and fees under $30 a quarter are waived entirely — most people pay nothing.
  2. Free mirror: CourtListener, run by the nonprofit Free Law Project, mirrors most of these dockets. Search your business name or the case number.

Step 2 — Read the docket like a timeline

The docket is just a numbered list of events. In a typical ADA website case the first entries are:

  1. Complaint — the lawsuit itself. It names the plaintiff, your business, and lists what their expert says fails on your site. Read it; the allegations are usually specific (images without alt text, unlabeled forms, keyboard traps).
  2. Civil cover sheet — administrative. The "nature of suit" code for these cases is 446 (ADA — Other).
  3. Request for issuance of summons → Summons issued — the paperwork that must exist before you can be formally served. If the docket shows the summons was issued two days ago, the papers reaching your front desk are likely right behind it.
  4. Affidavit / return of service — appears after a process server delivers the papers. Once served, response clocks start (in federal court, generally 21 days to answer or respond) — which is why the next step is not optional.

Step 3 — Call a lawyer. Actually.

Nothing here is legal advice, and no website fixer — me included — replaces counsel. These cases are routine for attorneys who handle them: most end in a negotiated settlement whose terms typically include a payment and a commitment to bring the site into conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA by a deadline. Your lawyer negotiates the first part. The second part is engineering, and it exists regardless of how the negotiation goes — which is the part I do: fixed-scope remediation, and why a widget subscription won't satisfy it.

Sanity notes

  1. Being sued before you were served is normal — filing comes first, service follows by days or weeks.
  2. Anyone who emails you about your case learned about it the same way you just verified it: public records. Judge them by whether what they say checks out on pacer.gov, not by how official they sound.
  3. Deadlines in these cases belong to the court and the settlement — be suspicious of anyone whose urgency is about their offer instead.