ADA Website Demand Letter? What Happens in 14 Days

Every case is different, and only your attorney can tell you the actual deadlines that apply to your specific letter. But here is the general shape of how the first two weeks tend to unfold for businesses that receive one of these letters.

• Day 0 to 1: The letter arrives. Read the whole thing. Note who sent it, which law firm represents them, what specific pages or features are named, and whether the letter states a response window (commonly somewhere between 10 and 30 days, though every letter is different). Keep the original and every envelope or email header. Do not reply yet.
• Day 1 to 3: Find an attorney, not a fix. The first real task is retaining counsel experienced with ADA web accessibility claims, not opening a support ticket with your developer. An attorney can tell you whether the letter looks like a genuine claim or a template, whether the named firm has a pattern of filings you should know about, and what your realistic options are. This step matters more than anything else on this list.
• Day 3 to 7: Gather your records. While your attorney reviews the letter, pull together anything that shows accessibility effort predates the letter: prior scan reports, an accessibility statement, a VPAT, remediation tickets, or vendor contracts that reference accessibility requirements. None of this makes a claim disappear, but documented, ongoing effort is consistently described by attorneys as a meaningfully stronger position than starting from zero.
• Day 7 to 14: Counsel opens a dialogue. This is usually when your attorney responds to the sender, if a response is warranted at all, and any negotiation begins. Many demand letters are resolved, reduced, or withdrawn during this window without a case ever being filed. Whatever window the letter itself states is a negotiating position from the sender, not a legal requirement, and your attorney is the one who determines what actually has to happen by when.

If nothing is resolved in those two weeks, the process continues rather than ends: more negotiation, or a complaint filed in federal or state court. A demand letter is the start of a process, not a single deadline you either meet or miss.

Some businesses receive a letter and assume it must be a scam because it feels sudden, or because a handful of the same law firms and plaintiffs file large numbers of similar claims across many unrelated companies. It is true that a small number of frequent filers, sometimes called serial plaintiffs, account for a disproportionate share of ADA website claims, and it is true that some letters are largely template language with a scanner's output pasted in.

None of that means a letter is fake or safe to ignore. The ADA does not require a plaintiff to have visited your site repeatedly or to prove financial harm the way some other claims do, and a letter can be both boilerplate and legally real at the same time. Assessing whether a specific letter, sender, and set of claims is something to take seriously is exactly the judgment call an attorney is trained to make. Guessing on your own is the risk, not the letter itself.

Plenty of demand letters are resolved in this window through negotiation, often for a settlement figure well below the cost of contested litigation, alongside a commitment to fix the issues raised. Others are withdrawn entirely once counsel pushes back or demonstrates the claims do not hold up. And some proceed to a filed complaint, which starts an entirely separate legal process with its own actual court deadlines. Whichever path yours takes, remediation work does not become less important once the letter is handled. Continued monitoring is what keeps a site that passed a one-time audit from quietly regressing and drawing a second letter. Our accessibility monitoring guide covers what that looks like on an ongoing basis, and the accessibility compliance hub breaks down how ADA, WCAG, and Section 508 fit together if you are new to the terminology.