The bimodal bar

Strip the names off the case captions, plot the rest as a histogram, and the picture that emerges does not look like one ecosystem. It looks like two — two completely separate species of plaintiff, briefly cohabiting the same federal docket. On one side, a long, flat tail of individuals who filed a single web accessibility lawsuit and were not heard from again. On the other, a sharp, narrow spike of repeat filers whose names appear on dozens — sometimes hundreds — of complaints.

The shape is bimodal in the strict statistical sense. Two distinct peaks, separated by a sparsely populated middle. Most plaintiffs cluster at one. A small but meaningful group cluster at fifty, a hundred, two hundred and beyond. Almost nobody sits in the gap. There is no smooth continuum running from “tested one website” to “filed two hundred complaints.” There is a long tail and there is an industrial cluster, and very little in between.

That gap is the story. It tells you that web accessibility litigation, as it actually operates in 2026, is not one phenomenon. It is two. One of them looks like the rest of civil rights enforcement: an individual encounters a barrier, hires a lawyer, and sues. The other looks like a manufacturing line: a small number of named plaintiffs, paired with a small number of plaintiff-side firms, producing complaints at a cadence that more closely resembles invoice generation than litigation. Both are legal. Both are operating inside Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act as it has been interpreted by the federal courts. But they are not the same thing, and treating them as one phenomenon — as most reporting and most policy debate does — produces conclusions that are wrong in opposite directions depending on which species you focus on.

The math underneath this picture is unintuitive. The six plaintiffs in the rightmost cluster — the ones who filed more than a hundred cases each — collectively generate roughly the same volume of litigation as the entire long tail of six hundred one-shot filers. Two filers, by themselves, account for more cases than four hundred-plus single-case plaintiffs combined. The disability community contains millions of people. The federal docket contains tens of thousands of accessibility cases. But the funnel from the first to the second runs through a remarkably narrow neck.

This is the structural fact this article is about. Not whether any individual plaintiff has a valid claim — most almost certainly do, and the disability community’s frustration with inaccessible websites is real, documented, and entirely justified. The fact is that the apparatus through which that frustration becomes a federal lawsuit has split into two unrecognizably different shapes, and the policy conversation has not caught up.

The plaintiffs in the long tail are mostly invisible. Their names appear once on a federal docket and then disappear. They sue a single defendant — frequently a regional retailer, a local services business, a healthcare provider — usually one they have an actual relationship with. The complaint typically reads as the artifact of a real, specific encounter: a customer who tried to do something on a website, could not, and filed suit. They are represented, more often than not, by general civil rights or disability counsel rather than by a high-volume specialist firm. After the case settles, dismisses, or proceeds to judgment, they are not heard from again on the federal accessibility docket.

Tier One looks like classical civil rights litigation. A protected-class plaintiff. A defendant whose policy or practice excluded them. A specific, articulable harm. A single courtroom. This is what Title III enforcement was designed to look like when Congress passed the ADA in 1990 — though in 1990 Congress was thinking about parking lots and ramps, not screen readers and ARIA labels, and that mismatch is part of how the second tier became possible.

These cases are also, almost without exception, the ones where the underlying merits are easiest to evaluate. A plaintiff who can describe the website they tried to use, the task they tried to accomplish, and the assistive technology they were using, presents a clear factual record. Courts in jurisdictions with rigorous standing scrutiny — the Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits — have generally allowed these cases to proceed. They are the cases that look most like the kind of enforcement Congress contemplated.

These cases also produce, in aggregate, a real public good. Most accessibility improvements made by mid-sized businesses in the past decade have come not because the business read a regulation but because either they themselves, a competitor, or a peer in their industry got sued. The threat of Tier One litigation, in other words, does the work that the Department of Justice has never quite gotten around to doing through formal rulemaking. The DOJ has spent more than two decades signaling that Title III applies to commercial websites without ever issuing a binding technical standard. In that regulatory vacuum, individual lawsuits became the mechanism by which the rules got specified.

The right end of the histogram looks nothing like the left. The plaintiffs in the industrial cluster do not appear on dockets occasionally. They appear on dockets at a steady, almost calendrical cadence — month after month, year after year, with a regularity that no individual encounter-based theory of harm can plausibly explain. Their names recur not because they happen to be unusually unlucky shoppers but because they are testers: plaintiffs who systematically scan websites looking for accessibility violations, almost always paired with a single law firm that drafts and files the resulting complaints in volume.

The Supreme Court used the word “tester” in its 2023 decision in Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Plaintiff I, where Justice Barrett wrote for a unanimous court that plaintiff Deborah Laufer “does not focus her efforts on hotels where she has any thought of staying, much less booking a room.” Plaintiff I had filed hundreds of suits against hotels whose websites failed to disclose accessibility information. The case was eventually mooted when she voluntarily dismissed it after one of her attorneys was sanctioned for fee-petition irregularities, and the Court declined to resolve the underlying standing question. But the basic shape of the operation — one named plaintiff, one law firm, hundreds of near-identical complaints — is the operating model of Tier Two.

The pairing is the unit of analysis. A Tier Two filer alone is not the operation; a Tier Two firm alone is not the operation; the combination is. In Minnesota, the law firm Throndset Michenfelder has filed dozens of accessibility complaints in federal court over the past several years naming Plaintiff A, including Plaintiff A v. Target, Plaintiff A v. Under Armour, Plaintiff A v. Simon Property Group, and Plaintiff A v. CVS on a self-service kiosk theory. In Florida, the firm Roderick V. Hannah, P.A., often working with Pelayo Duran, P.A., has filed hundreds of complaints naming Plaintiff B — among many others, including Plaintiff D, Plaintiff F, and Plaintiff G. In California and elsewhere, Manning Law APC files high-volume on behalf of plaintiffs including Plaintiff C and Plaintiff E. In Missouri, the ADA Legal Team LLC files for Plaintiff H. In New York, the firms Stein Saks and Gottlieb & Associates have for years dominated the SDNY and EDNY web accessibility dockets with rotating rosters of named plaintiffs.

In the underlying dataset for this article, two plaintiffs alone account for filing volumes that dwarf nearly all others: 256 cases attributed to Plaintiff A and 207 attributed to Plaintiff B. Public reporting suggests these are not anomalies. EcomBack’s full-year 2025 report identifies a small core of plaintiffs — Plaintiff C at 241 filings that year, Plaintiff A at 131, Plaintiff E at 130 — collectively responsible for half of all 3,948 federal web accessibility lawsuits filed nationally. A 2024 industry tally credited Stein Saks alone with 428 filings, more than twice as many as the next-busiest firm. Regional NBC affiliate WFTV’s Action 9, in a 2026 investigation, traced 383 lawsuits to Plaintiff B alone over the four-year period from 2022 through 2025.

When that reporter asked Plaintiff B, through an interpreter, whether he remembered visiting one of the small businesses he had sued, the answer was telling: he could not recall, because, as he put it, there were so many. That is not, in itself, an indictment. There are many reasons a person who has filed hundreds of cases in a few years might struggle to recall any particular one. But it is a fact about how this litigation is structured that should travel with the headline figures. The lived experience of a Tier Two plaintiff is closer to that of a sales prospector working a list than to that of a wronged customer seeking redress.

The list below is a partial census of the most active named plaintiffs in federal web accessibility filings, drawn from the analyzed dataset and cross-referenced with public industry trackers. Filing volumes vary by methodology and time window — the figures here reflect cumulative federal filings as compiled in the dataset under analysis. The pairing of plaintiff with primary counsel is consistent across the public record.

Three structural facts jump off this table. First: the geography is concentrated. Florida’s Southern District, Minnesota’s District, California’s Central District, and New York’s Southern and Eastern Districts together account for the vast majority of the volume. Second: the plaintiff–firm pairings are stable. Particular plaintiffs file with particular firms, year after year, with very little switching. Third: the firms above the line are repeat operators in the same way the plaintiffs are. Stein Saks, Gottlieb & Associates, Roderick V. Hannah, Throndset Michenfelder, Manning Law APC — these are not generalist civil rights shops moonlighting in accessibility. They are accessibility-litigation specialists, in the same way that mass-tort firms specialize in pharmaceutical claims or asbestos claims.

The bimodal distribution did not emerge spontaneously. It is the predictable output of three statutory and regulatory features acting in combination — none of them designed to produce this outcome, all of them metabolizing in unintended ways once digital commerce became the default.

The first is the structure of Title III itself. The ADA’s public-accommodations provision allows private plaintiffs to seek injunctive relief, but it does not authorize money damages. A plaintiff who wins a Title III case can force the defendant to fix the website. They cannot collect a check. What they can collect, under the ADA’s fee-shifting provision, is reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs. That structural choice — designed in 1990 to incentivize civil-rights enforcement without creating a damages bonanza — has aged into something else. In a world where nearly every commercial entity has a website and many of those websites have technical accessibility issues, the prospect of fee recovery alone is enough to support a high-volume practice, provided the cases settle quickly.

The second feature is the state-law overlay. Several states attached money damages to web-accessibility violations through laws older and broader than the ADA. California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act provides for $4,000 in statutory damages per violation; before recent state-court rulings narrowed its application to online-only businesses, this was the engine that drove California’s web-accessibility docket. Minnesota’s Human Rights Act allows damages and a multiplier — which is why Minnesota’s docket leans heavily on filings that pair an ADA claim with an MHRA claim. New York City and New York State have their own anti-discrimination statutes that some plaintiffs have begun invoking in state court as federal SDNY courts have narrowed their interpretation of Title III. The state overlay turns the federal ADA’s no-damages structure into a damages structure indirectly.

The third feature is the regulatory void. The Department of Justice has stated for nearly two decades that Title III applies to commercial websites. It has never issued a binding technical standard saying which technical conformance criteria a website must meet to avoid liability. It has gestured at WCAG — the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — without formally codifying it for the private-sector public-accommodations context. (The 2024 Title II rule did codify WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government, but Title III private-sector covered entities remain in regulatory limbo.) The absence of a clear “if-you-do-this-you-are-safe” rule means there is no defendable bright-line compliance posture. There is always something a plaintiff can plausibly allege, which means there is always a complaint that can plausibly be drafted.

Combine these three features and you get the bimodal market. The fee-shifting provision creates the revenue model. The state overlays add settlement leverage. The absent technical standard guarantees no defendant can ever fully insulate itself. A specialist plaintiff-side firm with low marginal cost per filing, paired with a willing tester plaintiff, can run that combination at industrial scale. A non-specialist plaintiff who has experienced a real and specific harm can run it once. Both are working inside the same statute. The statute does not distinguish between them.

That last row in the comparison is the most important and the most uncomfortable. The defenders of Tier Two — and there are credible defenders, including some disability advocacy organizations who filed amicus briefs supporting tester standing in Acheson — argue that in the absence of a meaningful federal regulator, private testers are the regulator. Their lawsuits are the only mechanism actually moving the needle on commercial web accessibility. Without them, businesses would never voluntarily comply, because the cost of compliance is real and the cost of non-compliance, in the absence of enforcement, is zero.

The critics — including some plaintiff-side ADA attorneys themselves, who object to the high-volume model — argue that what looks like enforcement is actually a fee-extraction mechanism dressed in civil rights language. The legitimate disability-rights interest, on this view, is being used as a cover for a private litigation business with a ratchet effect that makes everyone worse off: settlement-paying defendants, plaintiff-side attorneys collecting fees on cases that produce no real accessibility improvement (because the website was already going to need work), and the actual disability community, whose grievances become harder to take seriously the more the headline figures shift toward an industrial production line.

Both views are coherent. Both have evidence. The structural fact — that the bar has split into two tiers, and that the tiers are not interchangeable — is the precondition for taking either view seriously.

Pressure has begun to accumulate against Tier Two from three different directions: the federal courts, the federal trade enforcement apparatus, and — most recently — the appellate doctrine that has historically been most permissive of high-volume web accessibility filings. None of this pressure has so far reduced overall filing volumes, which actually rose in 2025 to nearly 4,000 federal cases. But it has begun to reshape which jurisdictions plaintiffs choose to file in, which theories they can plausibly pursue, and which firms can sustain the model.

In late 2023, the Supreme Court took up Acheson Hotels v. Plaintiff I to settle the circuit split on tester standing. After Plaintiff I’s lawyer was sanctioned and Plaintiff I voluntarily dismissed her pending suits, the Court mooted the case unanimously, vacated the lower-court decision, and explicitly declined to resolve the standing question — while signaling that “we might exercise our discretion differently in a future case.” Justice Thomas, concurring, would have decided the merits and held that Plaintiff I lacked standing because her claim asserted no violation of her own rights. The standing question survives.

In December 2024, SDNY Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled in Mejia v. High Brew Coffee Inc. that the ADA does not cover online-only businesses. The decision broke with prior SDNY rulings and immediately reduced the federal volume in New York’s most-active web accessibility venue. Plaintiff-side firms responded by shifting to state court — but state-court filings carry their own tradeoffs, including narrower fee provisions in some jurisdictions.

In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered overlay vendor accessiBe to pay $1 million for misleading marketing claims about its automated accessibility-remediation widget. The FTC found accessiBe had paid for fake reviews and made unsubstantiated claims about WCAG conformance. The order matters less for its dollar figure than for what it acknowledged: a category of products marketed as legal-risk insurance is not actually delivering on the promise, and is itself becoming a litigation target — accessibility widgets were cited as barriers in roughly a quarter of all 2024 federal filings.

And in the background, Stein Saks PLLC — the highest-volume plaintiff-side firm in 2024 — was named in a federal RICO suit by Experian Information Solutions, which alleges (in a separate Fair Credit Reporting Act context, not ADA) that the firm and its principals fabricated evidence and extorted settlements. The allegation is contested, but its existence on a public docket signals a maturation of the defense bar’s response: from individual defense of individual cases to systemic challenge of the firms that file them.

The cumulative picture is one of pressure without containment. Courts are skeptical of online-only theories. The FTC has signaled that overlay-vendor claims will be policed. Defendants are organizing. But the underlying incentive structure — the absence of a federal technical standard, the leverage of state-law damages, the predictable settlement value of a templated complaint — has not changed. As long as those three features persist, the bimodal distribution will persist with them.

The risk profile a business actually faces is dominated by Tier Two, not Tier One — for a simple reason: Tier Two filers produce most of the cases. A randomly selected business getting sued for web accessibility is more likely to have been identified by a tester running automated scans than to have offended a customer who lives down the street. That distinction matters because the optimal response is different. Tier One settlements are usually accompanied by a real remediation discussion with a real plaintiff. Tier Two settlements are transactions: a dollar figure, a fee component, a release.

The economics of the response are surprisingly stable across cases. The practical question is not whether to spend money — money will be spent — but where it should be spent and in what order.

The model above is rough by design — it cannot substitute for case-specific legal advice, and any number it produces will be wrong in the third significant digit. What it gets right is the rank ordering. For most exposed businesses, sustained settlement of incoming cases costs more, over a multi-year horizon, than a real remediation program. That is not surprising — it is the same calculation that drives most regulatory compliance investment in any other context. The unusual feature of the web-accessibility market is how poorly the calculation is appreciated by the firms making it. Many businesses settle their first suit, do nothing structural, and find themselves served again 18 months later by a different plaintiff filed by a different firm operating off a different scan of the same still-uncorrected website.

The key insight from the bimodal distribution, for defendants, is this: the named plaintiff is largely irrelevant to your exposure. Tier Two filers are interchangeable. If the website remains technically non-compliant, a different name will appear on a different complaint at a different point in the year. Settling individual cases without remediating the underlying technical issues is not a defense strategy; it is a subscription.

Almost everyone with skin in the web-accessibility game agrees the current equilibrium is failing — though they disagree, vehemently, about why. Plaintiff-side counsel see a private enforcement mechanism that, despite some excesses, is the only thing that has moved the commercial web toward accessibility in the absence of meaningful federal regulation. Defense-side counsel see a fee-extraction industry. Disability advocacy organizations see both: the legitimate enforcement function and the reputational damage caused by the more aggressive operators. Businesses see only the demand letters.

Three reform proposals recur in the literature. None of them is unproblematic, but each addresses a different leg of the bimodal-bar tripod.

A federal technical standard. The cleanest fix would be DOJ adoption of WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 AA as the binding Title III private-sector standard, with a defined safe harbor for substantial conformance. The DOJ has gestured at this for two decades; the Title II rule for state and local government, finalized in 2024, codified WCAG 2.1 AA as the standard there. Extending the same standard to private public accommodations would not eliminate accessibility litigation, but it would replace the current “anything is plausibly arguable” pleading regime with something defendable. It would also, importantly, make remediation investments more rational, because defendants would know what they are aiming for.

Notice and cure. A statutory or regulatory requirement that plaintiffs send a pre-suit notice and allow a defined cure period (90 to 180 days) before filing in federal court is the most-discussed legislative reform. Versions have appeared in proposed legislation for years; none has passed. The argument in favor is that it would dramatically reduce friction-induced settlement value while preserving genuine enforcement against bad-faith non-compliers. The argument against — voiced by some disability-rights organizations — is that businesses with a decade or more of opportunity to comply do not need additional grace periods, and that notice-and-cure converts a substantive right into a procedural hurdle.

Tester-standing clarification. The Supreme Court will eventually have to confront the question it ducked in Acheson. A definitive ruling — either way — would resolve a significant share of the ambiguity. A ruling against tester standing would compress the rightmost cluster of the histogram by removing the legal foundation of the high-volume model. A ruling in favor would entrench it, but at least clarify the rules under which both sides operate. The one outcome the system probably cannot sustain indefinitely is the current circuit split.

The bimodal bar is, ultimately, the legible artifact of an unfinished policy debate. Congress passed Title III in 1990 and assumed the courts and the executive branch would work out the details. The executive branch never finished the rulemaking. The courts produced inconsistent answers across circuits. Into that gap, a private-enforcement market matured. Two species of plaintiff now share the docket: the customer with a real grievance and the tester with a portfolio. The first looks like the kind of plaintiff Title III was written for. The second looks like an emergent feature of the system Title III became.

Neither is going away. A serious accessibility policy would acknowledge both, address the structural conditions that produced the second, and stop pretending the first does not also exist. The data — six hundred plaintiffs at the bottom of the histogram, six at the top — is just the picture of a debate the country has so far refused to have.