New York Daily News: Brooklyn lawyer files avalanche of lawsuits over website accessibility for the blind

By: Stephen Rex Brown

A Brooklyn lawyer has filed hundreds of lawsuits this year over websites that fail to accommodate the blind – a practice that critics say is all about making a quick buck.

Attorney Joseph Mizrahi has filed an astonishing 411 suits in Manhattan Federal Court on behalf of 13 visually impaired people. The paperwork charges a wide array of businesses violated the Americans With Disabilities Act through sites that are incompatible with screen-reading programs. The suits seek to force each company to overhaul its site and make it accessible.

The businesses Mizrahi sued run the gamut – from casinos to retirement homes, racetracks to breweries. Steinway Pianos, the Dish Network, Apple and Caribbean Cruises all have landed in Mizrahi's crosshairs in the past nine months.

"This is unquestionably being abused. The goal of these cases is just to get legal fees," said Tom Stebbins, executive director of the Albany-based Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York.

"It's profit-seeking attorneys abusing the legal system and using handicapped people as a front."

Under New York law, damages for such cases are capped at $500. But there is no limit on attorneys' fees.

Mizrahi appears to be one of a handful of attorneys who have cornered the niche market. An analysis by a legal blog devoted to the Americans With Disabilities Act found that New York has the most website accessibility suits, with 630 filed between January and June. That means Mizrahi may be responsible for most of those suits.

One of his 13 clients, Braulio Thorne, has sued 45 different companies, including a batch of watchmakers like Rolex and Breitling. Thorne also took aim at life insurance companies. Another client, Kathleen Sypert, has filed 44 suits. She sued an assortment of radiologists, assisted living facilities, country clubs and catering companies. Messages left for both were not returned.

Defense lawyer Ernest Badway, who has represented many businesses sued over website accessibility, said that a company that settles such a suit quickly will typically pay about $20,000. If the business fights the case, costs can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.

"Some companies have just taken down their websites," he explained.

Mizrahi is not the only attorney on many of the cases, but he appears to be the one who has sued the most in 2018. He did not return an email or phone call.

Earlier this month, six U.S. senators and dozens of members of the House of Representatives wrote separate letters to the Justice Department urging it to clarify what constitutes Americans With Disabilities Act compliance. The politicians who penned the notes were almost exclusively Republican.

The missive explained that more website accessibility suits were filed in the first half of this year – 1,053 — than in all of 2017, when there were 814 suits.

"Businesses would rather invest in making sure they can serve their disabled customers, instead of pay money to avoid a shakedown by trial lawyers who do not have the interests of the disabled at heart," the senators wrote.

Both Badway and Stebbins said attorneys filing these kinds of accessibility suits use "web crawler" programs to analyze sites' coding to determine if they are good candidates for a lawsuit.

A spokesman for the National Federation for the Blind recommended that visually impaired people try contacting a business about problems with a website before filing a lawsuit.

"We always encourage the community to be proactive," the spokesman said.

"There's literally no way all this is going to be resolved in the legal arena."