Got an ADA website demand letter? The first 72 hours.

A website accessibility demand letter is pre-suit volume litigation: a plaintiff's firm ran automated WCAG scans across thousands of sites, your domain surfaced with mechanical failures, and the letter is priced below your cost of mounting a defense. That's not a reason to dismiss it: the legal theory is real (Robles v. Domino's settled that the ADA reaches commercial websites, and state statutes like California's Unruh Act add $4,000 per occurrence). But it is the context for every decision that follows: you are one of hundreds of recipients in a process, not a singled-out defendant in a vendetta.

Before the to-do list, the not-to-do list:

• Don't reply yourself: not to argue, not to apologize, not to explain that you're a small business. Anything you write is a statement in a potential case, and 'we didn't know' is not a defense the statute recognizes.
• Don't pay quickly to make it disappear. Fast, unverified settlements mark you as a payer, and the same mechanical failures that drew this letter will draw the next firm's scan. Settling can absolutely be the right call, but only after counsel prices it against verified facts.
• Don't sign anything, including 'simple' remediation agreements. Settlement terms (scope, monitoring, fees, releases) are exactly the part a lawyer earns their fee on.
• Don't quietly delete or overhaul the cited pages before preserving their current state. Remediation is the goal, but destroying evidence of what the site looked like when the claim arose creates a spoliation problem your counsel now has to manage.

Preserve first: archive the pages the letter cites (full-page screenshots with dates, saved HTML, and a note of your platform/theme/plugin versions). You want an unimpeachable record of the site's state at the moment the claim arrived, both for counsel and for showing the remediation timeline later.

Then verify the claims independently. The letter's findings came from an automated scan; run your own and compare. Two questions matter: are the cited barriers actually present (false positives are common in volume letters), and what else is on your site that the letter didn't cite? Remediating only the named items is the classic mistake: the next scan, from the next firm, finds the rest. A Complidar scan covers the full surface in minutes and maps each accessibility finding to its WCAG criterion, which is the format your counsel and your developer both need.

While you're at it, pull the contracts: whoever built or maintains the site (agency, freelancer, platform) may have accessibility commitments or indemnity language worth knowing about before the counsel conversation.

Retain a lawyer with ADA Title III website experience specifically. This is a volume practice area on the defense side too, and an experienced defense firm knows the plaintiff firms, their settlement ranges, and which letters fold under scrutiny. Arrive with your preservation file and scan results; counsel negotiating from verified facts is cheaper than counsel discovering facts at hourly rates.

Call your insurance broker the same day and ask whether to tender the claim. Some general-liability and business-owner policies respond to accessibility claims and some don't, but late notice can forfeit coverage that existed, so the question costs nothing and the silence can be expensive.

Whatever the settlement posture, the remediation project starts now, and it should be scoped to your full surface, not the letter's excerpt: fix the mechanical findings (alt text, labels, contrast, keyboard paths), schedule human review for the judgment criteria automation can't verify, and document every fix with dates. That documentation is leverage in this negotiation and armor against the next letter: serial filers re-scan, and a site that visibly remediated is a worse target than one that paid and changed nothing.

The uncomfortable truth about demand letters is that they work because most recipients never knew what an automated scan would say about their site. The recipients who fare best are the ones who can put verified facts on the table within days. That part (the facts) is exactly what you can control this week.

It's the operational playbook around the legal process: preserve, verify, get counsel, check coverage, remediate fully, document. Every strategic decision (respond or not, settle or not, for how much) belongs to a licensed attorney looking at your specific letter. What Complidar contributes is the verified-facts step: the same scan a plaintiff's firm ran, run for you, with evidence attached.