A California-specific, hour-by-hour playbook for the first 72 hours after an ADA Title III / Unruh Act demand letter or lawsuit arrives. What to preserve, who to call, what to never do, and how the firm that sent it shapes your defense.
The first hour determines whether your defense starts from a strong evidentiary footing or a compromised one. Four concrete actions:
Take a clean PDF or photograph of the demand letter or complaint, including every page, every exhibit, and the envelope it came in (postmark, return address, certified-mail tracking number). If it arrived by email, save the original .eml file with full headers — not just a screenshot of the message body. The sender's identity, sending firm, and exact date/time of delivery all matter for procedural defenses.
If the demand is about your website, stop all deploys, content edits, and accessibility "fixes" immediately. This sounds counterintuitive — you want to comply — but changes you make in response to a demand can be argued as knowledge of noncompliance, which is one of the elements plaintiffs try to prove under the Unruh Act's intentional-discrimination prong. Your counsel will decide whether and when to begin remediation in a way that doesn't undermine your defense.
Take a full-site screenshot (or a Wayback Machine snapshot at web.archive.org/save) and a downloaded HTML/CSS snapshot of every page mentioned in the complaint. This is your evidence of the site as the plaintiff allegedly encountered it. If the plaintiff later amends the complaint to add "barriers" you have since fixed, your snapshot resolves the dispute.
The firm name on the letterhead is the single most important diagnostic for how the case will unfold. California's ADA / Unruh website-and-premises plaintiffs' bar is concentrated — a handful of firms generate most filings, each with a recognizable playbook:
Knowing which firm sent the demand often shapes the opening negotiating posture — a pre-litigation demand from Pacific Trial responds differently than a filed complaint from Potter Handy.
These are very different procedural postures, and they trigger different timelines.
Day 1 of the response clock is the day after the date of service, not the day of service. If you were served by personal delivery on May 1, your 30-day state-court deadline is May 31. If you were served by substituted service or mail, additional days are added under Code Civ. Proc. § 415.20 and § 415.30. Write the deadline on a calendar in three places. Set a reminder for seven days before, three days before, and the day of.
If your business has no California physical presence — no office, no retail location, no warehouse, no California-resident employees — you may have a strong threshold defense. Martinez v. Cot'N Wash, Inc. (2022) 81 Cal.App.5th 1026 held that a standalone website with no California physical nexus is not a "place of public accommodation" under Title III, and that mere WCAG noncompliance does not satisfy Unruh's intentional-discrimination requirement. This supports a demurrer (state court) or motion to dismiss (federal court) that, if granted, ends the case at the pleading stage.
The defense is not absolute. The plaintiff can still try the intentional-discrimination prong, and the demurrer turns on facts — remote California employees, shipping to California customers, advertising targeted at California users, prior California presence, and similar factors can all be argued either way. But for many out-of-state online businesses, this is the first defense to evaluate. Tell your counsel on the first call.
If you're not sure whether you qualify, the ADA Exposure Self-Checker on our ADA Defense page will flag it for you.
Not generic litigation counsel. California ADA / Unruh defense has its own pattern of decisions, plaintiff firms, and procedural quirks — the difference between counsel who has handled fifty of these and counsel who is encountering one for the first time is substantial. The first consultation is usually complimentary; use it.
Many CGL policies expressly exclude ADA claims, but cyber-liability and EPLI policies sometimes pick them up — and a few CGL policies cover them when the underlying claim is pleaded as negligence rather than discrimination. The insurer's duty to defend is broader than the duty to indemnify; even a tender that is ultimately denied may produce a defense contribution. The tender must be in writing and must include the demand letter or complaint. Late tender can excuse the insurer's coverage obligation entirely, so do it on day one.
By the end of the first week, you and your counsel should have decided among three principal strategic paths. Each has its profile.
Most California ADA / Unruh cases settle. Routine single-plaintiff matters resolve in the $5,000–$35,000 range; contested or higher-stakes cases run $50,000–$100,000+. The economics push settlement: even a meritless case costs $10,000–$25,000 to defend through motion practice, and the Unruh fee-shifting provision means plaintiff's fees accumulate every week. The right settlement decision turns on (a) the strength of any threshold defense (especially Cot'N Wash), (b) whether the underlying barriers are real and easily fixed, (c) the firm that sent it, and (d) your appetite for the cost and time of litigation.
If the case is filed (not just a demand letter) and you don't have a strong threshold defense, the standard path is to file an answer within the response deadline, conduct limited discovery, and then evaluate dispositive motions. This path is more expensive than settlement but preserves the option to defeat the case on the merits or extract a better settlement after the plaintiff sees the actual record. Counsel may also explore challenges to the plaintiff's Article III standing (Calcano v. Swarovski in federal court) or to the plaintiff's prior settlement history in similar matters.
If you have a strong threshold defense — most commonly the Cot'N Wash "no public accommodation" argument for pure e-commerce, but also nexus-mitigation arguments under Robles v. Domino's, or insufficient allegations of intentional discrimination — the right move may be to demur (state court) or move to dismiss (federal court) before answering. A successful demurrer can end the case at the pleading stage. An unsuccessful demurrer is still useful: it surfaces the plaintiff's best arguments early and frames the discovery that follows.
At some point during this window, you and your counsel will discuss whether to begin physical or website remediation. The competing pressures: remediation reduces ongoing exposure and supports a good-faith-remediation defense to intentional-discrimination claims, but uncoordinated remediation can be argued as admission of noncompliance. The right answer depends on the case posture, the firm involved, and whether settlement discussions are active. Don't make this decision alone.
This is the worst outcome and the most common one in this practice area. If your response window has lapsed and you have not filed an answer, the plaintiff can request entry of default and then a default judgment. California courts routinely enter default judgments granting the full amount pleaded under Civ. Code § 52(a) — $25,000–$75,000 plus attorneys' fees, costs, post-judgment interest at 10% per annum (Code Civ. Proc. § 685.010), and an injunction requiring WCAG 2.1 AA conformance with a hard remediation deadline.
Under Code Civ. Proc. § 473(b), a defendant has six months from entry of default to move to set it aside on grounds of "mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect." Attorney-fault declarations (§ 473(b) second paragraph) are essentially mandatory when the failure was counsel's, but client-fault motions face a higher standard. Courts favor decisions on the merits, but the motion must be filed quickly and supported by a proposed answer.
Default-setting-aside motions are time-sensitive and procedurally exacting. If you have just discovered a default has been entered against you, contact California counsel today.
A productive first call covers the threshold defense check, the deadline calculation, and the strategic-path decision in about 30 minutes. To make that possible, have the following ready:
Same-day evaluation. No charge for the first 30 minutes.
