The letters to colleges’ chief legal officers started with a warning and ended with an offer some might have felt reluctant to refuse.
Carlson Lynch Sweet Kilpela and Carpenter, a law firm based in Pittsburgh, said it represents “disabled individuals throughout the United States who access or attempt to access internet-based educational services,” and it was contacting the addressees because their colleges’ web pages “are inaccessible to our clients,” in violation of federal disability-rights laws. It attached the results of website analyses concluding that many of the colleges’ online pages failed to meet widely accepted accessibility standards.
Often the firm also told colleges that they may be violating its clients’ privacy rights under state consumer-protection and computer-trespass laws, by maintaining websites that gathered personal information from visitors whose disabilities rendered them unable to agree to the terms for offering up such information.
The letters offered, “in lieu of immediately filing a lawsuit in federal court or in state court,” to use “a collaborative approach” and work with the college to fix the problems that the lawyers had identified. They proposed a settlement that called for the college to pay legal fees and to hire a consultant approved by the firm to bring the web pages in line with what the law requires. They urged colleges to contact the firm within 20 days.
The colleges had good reason to believe the firm meant business, even if its business model seemed to assume that they would be inclined to pay it to go away. In recent years it had sent similar letters to long lists of banks, restaurants, and retailers. It had filed lawsuits accusing major companies and the National Collegiate Athletic Association of website-accessibility violations. Many of the lawsuits have the same plaintiffs, whose identities it generally refuses to disclose as long as there remains a chance it might not need to go to court.
This special report examines the challenges that students, academics, and colleges face in dealing with physical disabilities as well as conditions that are less visible.
More than 100 colleges received such letters last year, estimates Robb Jones, general counsel for claims management at United Educators, a risk-management and insurance firm. Breeze Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Board of Regents, said the letters went to all types of public colleges in her state.
Colleges, however, are different in crucial ways from other organizations that the firm previously went after. They tend, for example, to make decisions much more slowly than private companies do. Perhaps most important, they face enough risk of litigation, including by the federal government, to perhaps see little value in signing a legal settlement that in no way indemnifies them from being sued by someone else.
Mr. Jones says he knows of no college that has settled with the firm or been sued by it, and he has not heard of its threatening any college within the past six months.
Officials at Carlson Lynch Sweet Kilpela and Carpenter did not reply to multiple requests for comment from The Chronicle.
Many of the firm’s letters to colleges also bore the signature of KamberLaw, a New York firm that specializes in cases involving internet privacy rights. Scott A. Kamber, one of its founding members, says it has not signed any such letters in six months.
“I think,” he says, “that the university piece of this was always a particularly small segment, and it kind of ran its course.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
