It is seldom good news when your business hears from a lawyer you don’t know, and so it was for Kevin Nashan this past spring. The James Beard-winning chef, who owns Sidney Street Cafe and Peacemaker Lobster & Crab, got a letter from a Kansas City-based attorney representing a blind man.
The letter claimed the man had been unable to use the website for one of Nashan’s restaurants because it was not compatible with screen access software, and that made it incompatible with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Attorney Kevin Puckett wrote that it was his “goal” to have Nashan enter into a settlement agreement where Nashan would agree to maintain an accessible website going forward—and also cover Puckett’s fees and costs incurred in investigating the website’s deficiencies.
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The letter, Nashan says, felt like a “shakedown.” The blind man who’d allegedly sought to use his website lives in Caldwell County, Missouri, part of the Kansas City metro area. And, as Nashan would soon discover, Puckett has filed at least 70 such lawsuits on the same man’s behalf, including 28 in the St. Louis area in the past year alone. Many are against restaurants, but at least one local cannabis dispensary, a grocer, and even an urgent care have been hit with Puckett’s lawsuits. The fact that some settle before that point suggests many more may have been targeted.
Nashan is among those who’ve settled—not that he was happy about it. “He’s going after all these independent restaurants,” he says. “And, I mean, everyone’s trying to get payroll week to week, and then you get, in my opinion, these frivolous bullshit lawsuits that range from anywhere from a $5,000 to a $15,000 shakedown.” (Nashan declined to say what he paid in the settlement, but noted that his costs include not only what he paid to Puckett, but also his own lawyers’ fees.)
A New Area of the Law
Kyler Humphrey, an attorney with Summers Compton Wells, says one of the big frustrations for businesses hit with these suits is that ADA compliance for websites is not explicitly spelled out in the law. You could use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, but those have never been codified into law and change over time.
“With the ADA, everybody knows how big a ramp needs to be, because it’s explicitly written,” he says. “But with websites, there is absolutely no governmental specifics as to how you make your website in compliance.” And the third-party companies that restaurateurs hire to build their websites don’t seem on top of the issue (when confronted, they say it’s on the restaurant to ensure compliance, restaurateurs tell SLM).
Puckett appears to be only the most recent—and local—example of a problem that has previously bedeviled other federal circuits. “This litigation has been going on in New York, California, Florida, Texas, all the big places, for years,” Humphrey says. And some judges have taken a dim view of the lawsuits. A Maryland attorney was sanctioned in 2023 after filing more than 1,000 near-identical suits over hotel website accessibility on behalf of the same two people, and then claiming he’d accrued $10,000 each in legal fees. “Given that the complaints across all cases are boilerplate with few changes apart from dates and defendants, it appeared highly improbable that [he] actually could have accrued $10,000 in reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs when each demand was made,” a disciplinary panel wrote in its report on the matter. It recommended a six-month suspension.
As for Puckett, his wave of litigation also includes dozens of cases against Kansas City businesses filed on behalf of the same blind man, Robert G. Myers, beginning last year. The local television affiliate KMBC reports that Myers “lives on Puckett’s family property and rents a trailer from Puckett’s relatives,” and also alleges that some of Puckett’s own websites are not ADA compliant. Puckett says both allegations are false and that he’s served KMBC with a defamation notice and request to retract.
Puckett declined SLM’s request for a phone interview but agreed to answer a few questions by email. In response to our questions, he wrote that he could not estimate how many websites his clients had found to date in St. Louis that were not ADA compliant, nor could he say whether there would be many more claims filed in St. Louis.
“We are just attorneys and bring lawsuits when we are retained by a client to file same,” he wrote. “We can confirm that our client’s intent is not to pursue volume for volume’s sake, but rather to enforce longstanding federal law, be an advocate for the blind community that is so drastically marginalized in digital spaces, and to always provide notice to businesses prior to filing suit. The volume of claims will directly correlate with the claims we are hired to pursue and the continued lack of compliance.”
Asked his response to businesses who’d say his claims are a cash grab, Puckett wrote, “These cases seek injunctive relief (i.e. force the company/business to fix their website) to bring businesses into compliance and recover attorneys’ fees where appropriate. Suggesting it’s a ‘cash grab’ ignores the reality of these cases and prioritizes sensationalism, while ignoring the very real harm caused by these discriminatory websites, all while undermining the purpose of civil rights enforcement. The government rarely enforces the ADA, it is up to private citizens to force change as a whole, we are proud to represent those clients.”
Through Puckett, Myers provided a statement that says in part, “I pursue this advocacy because blind Americans, especially fellow blind veterans, are being systematically excluded from today’s digital world. Every website we make accessible is one fewer barrier for someone trying to apply for a job, order dinner, access healthcare, or simply live with dignity.”
To Settle, or To Fight
Restaurateur Dave Bailey says the problem is frustrating because he would have gladly fixed his company’s websites if only he’d been aware of the problem. Like Nashan, he hired a company that specializes in websites to build one for his Baileys Restaurants, which includes Baileys’ Range, Bridge Tap House & Wine Bar, and Rooster, and chose among its standard formats.
“We would, of course, assume that those formats would have complied with any laws that were there that were appropriate,” he says. And had someone notified him that the websites were deficient for users with disabilities, he would have fixed them. But the communication from Puckett’s firm left no option to do that without a monetary settlement.
“It causes a ton of stress, because you don’t know what to do,” he says. “If I do what feels like the right thing, which is to fight it, it’s also potentially more dangerous in the long run. Or do you just go ahead and settle with somebody that it seems doesn’t have the best interests of all parties in mind?”
In Missouri, at least two of Puckett’s lawsuits have survived motions to dismiss, suggesting a judge sees legal claims with the potential to succeed. But at least one other state has taken action to block such suits out of the gate. In 2023, Kansas passed a law to protect businesses from what’s sometimes called “sue-and-settle” litigation, or “ADA tester cases.” The “Act Against Abusive Website Access Litigation” allows Kansas businesses accused of ADA noncompliant websites to countersue for abusive litigation—with the presumption that litigation is abusive if business tried in good faith to remedy the alleged violation within 30 days of receiving written notice. Federal legislation introduced in 2024 would have also created a 30-day window for businesses to correct any website deficiencies before they could be held liable, but it stalled out in Congress.
For Bailey, the situation is frustrating.
“I have lots of family members with different disabilities and different accommodations that are required,” he says. “Whether you’re talking about something like a physical need or Celiac disease, we want to accommodate and we want to care for everybody, and that’s been a part of our ethos for 21 years. If you claim that we would purposely try to shut someone out from their ability to come to our restaurant, it is ridiculous.
He adds, “We would have, in a heartbeat, gone and fixed whatever we needed to fix for our websites.”
