ADA Website Compliance Suits Start to Target Cannabis Companies

Jan 18, 2022

The number of ADA website compliance lawsuits has seen a dramatic increase since 2017. Serial plaintiffs (and plaintiffs’ counsel) are targeting one industry after the next with suits claiming company websites fail to comply with Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act’s requirement that locations provide public accommodations to those with disabilities. According to Jason Taylor’s blog “ADA-based cases, where the subject of the claim was either a website, mobile application or video content, reached a rate of over 10 per day in 2021 with over 4000 in total.” Thus, it is only a matter of time before the cannabis industry became the target of these suits and it appears that time is nigh.

On January 11, 2022, a class action was filed against Canopy Growth USA in New York federal court alleging that the company’s website is inaccessible to visually impaired and blind customers. The suit, like nearly all of the suits attacking websites under the ADA, alleges that Canopy’s website is non-compliant with the plaintiff’s screen reader software and does not meet the international website standard guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The complaint asks that Canopy train its employees under W3C the guidelines and regularly test the website for compliance. The suit also asks that the company be ordered to develop an accessibility policy that is posted on its website with contact information for users to report accessibility related issues.

The suit, which is nearly identical to a suit filed against Prospect Farms Hemp Sales LLC in November 2021, follows the standard playbook for the wave of ADA website suits that have been filed over the last five years, which is not good for the cannabis industry. If history is an indicator, this will not be the last case against a cannabis company. Usually plaintiffs and their counsel go through an entire industry and identify any targets they can. If that pattern holds here, we should expect several more similar suits against cannabis companies in 2022. If your company is hit with this kind of lawsuit, or better yet if your company is looking to upgrade its website (and also its mobile app – yes, those are the targets of lawsuits as well) to come into compliance with the W3C guidelines, reach out to David Standa (david.standa@gmlaw.com) for assistance.

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ADA Website Compliance Suits Start to Target Cannabis Companies

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