By Minh N. Vu, Kristina Launey, and Susan Ryan
Seyfarth Synopsis: The two-year decline in ADA Title III filings stopped in 2024, with plaintiffs increasing filings back to 8,800 complaints in 2024.
When we first started tracking ADA Title III lawsuits in 2013, the total for the year was only 2,722. The number climbed steadily to an all-time high of 11,452 in 2021, and then fell to 8,694 in 2022. 2023 saw another decrease to approximately 8,200 filings. What would 2024 bring? More of the same or a return to the ADA Title III litigation heyday? The answer is: something in between.
In 2024, plaintiffs filed 8,800 ADA Title III complaints in federal district courts. This represents a 7% increase from 2023. And it’s more than triple the number of filings we saw in 2013, when we first started compiling these numbers.
After two years of being behind New York, California regained its top position with 3,252 filings. That’s a whopping 37 percent increase over 2023, but still significantly lower than its all-time high of 5,930 in 2021. One law firm drove the increase by filing 2,598 of these cases.
New York took second place, with 2,220 cases. We attribute the decrease to several plaintiffs’ firms now filing in New York or New Jersey state court after several unfavorable decisions from NY federal judges.
Florida came in third for the seventh year in a row, with 1,627 cases. Rounding out the top ten were Texas (224) Illinois (199), Pennsylvania (143), Missouri (135), Minnesota (134), New Jersey (134) and Georgia (107). Minnesota is a newcomer to the top ten list, taking the space left by Tennessee, which dropped out of the list.
Every year, there are some states with no ADA Title III filings at all. This year, those states are Alaska, Hawai’i, Iowa, Montana, Vermont and West Virginia. Surprisingly enough, North Dakota, which has had zero lawsuits from 2013 – 2023, broke its streak with two pro se cases in 2024 about pool lifts – a topic we’ve heard little about in a while.
Filings remained fairly steady throughout the year, ranging from a low of 633 in January (often a low month) to a high of 815 in October. July and August were tied for second place with 750 filings each month. The only other month of the year below 700 filings was June with 676.
What’s in store for 2025? We predict the numbers will remain between 8,000 and 9,000. Although we predict less enforcement of Title III of the ADA by the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), the reduction will have little impact on the number of lawsuits filed because the DOJ rarely had to file suit to enforce the law, even under Democratic administrations. Whether private citizens and advocacy groups will step up enforcement efforts to fill the void remains to be seen. We do expect private lawsuits to increase, though they will likely file more in state courts than federal courts, according to the trends we’ve anecdotally been seeing. We only report on federal lawsuit filings – not state filings – because the state court reporting services are less reliable for accurate data. For more predictions and our 2024 year in review, please see our prior post.
A note on our methodology: Our research involves a painstaking manual process of going through all federal cases that were coded as “ADA-Other,” manually culling out the ADA Title II cases in which the defendants are state and local governments, and categorizing them by state. The manual process means there is the small possibility of human error.
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