Portland businesses hit with ADA complaints, demands for thousands in attorney’s fees
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- čas přidán 15. 05. 2024
- Two Portland lawyers have sent out demand letters and filed dozens of ADA lawsuits against small businesses. In some of the letters, businesses are urged to settle within two weeks and pay attorney fees.
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This is flat out extortion .
Crimal behavior by lawyers.
These lawyers need to be fined and jailed if possible . We don’t need anymore crooked lawyers in this city. If they need money that bad they can start collecting cans and go to a deposit
they really trying to finesse this guy hard
If I can’t get into the building then I just go to another business. Lawyers just want a payday.
I know one of those attorneys and this is outrageous. Also a bit disappointing. 🤨
Clearly extortion using crooked lawfare. How about you knock on the guys door and tell him what could happen.
Quickest 10k ever....
Look, while I'm side-eyeing this demand for lawyer's fees, the argument that 'our customers just aren't complaining' just doesn't hold water. If I can't get into a business, I'm just not a customer in the first place. That is the net effect of discrimination.
As was mentioned elsewhere in the comments, ADA compliance deadlines ended THIRTEEN YEARS AGO. It is not the job of the disability community (yes, we do exist) to go around telling business owners how to be compliant.
And before anyone says it -- yes, I do own a business. It's my job to run my business correctly and in compliance with accessibility laws, not the job of my customers to tell me that I'm discriminating against them.
Very well said. I was thinking of posting something that covered what you did. Thank you.
Typical slimey lawyers.
Um...Aren't there hundreds of tents blocking sidewalks and ramps downtown still? I guess it's easier to go after individual business owners than the city/county.
It is extortion because they need to prove that whoever is suing you has actually been a customer, where is the credit card receipts where's the receipt showing that they've done business with you. These are ambulance chasing, that's all they are.
Shady AF
This happened in socal about 20 years ago I think the crooked lawyers got disbarred
Its a recent thing in SF as well, "In April 2022, the district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against Potter Handy, a law firm that has been accused of filing thousands of fraudulent ADA lawsuits against small businesses in California."
More evidence these lawyers are crooked.
www.osbar.org/_docs/dbreport/2021/MOLLIGANJessicaLee20-2720-2820-29.pdf
Nope have you clint come forward prove she or he has been a customer. How do they know she or he was a Client's
If these businesses had followed ADA laws they wouldn't be in this situation. Ignorance is not a good excuse to not follow the law. If you are going to be in business you should research every aspect, not just how to make money.
Lawyer, had to come from liar, or the other way around. “But it means loser”, they make enough money that they can afford to be “useless”.
Good lawyers “know the law”
Great lawyers, “know the judges”. That jew judge that used to be on free TV, “has caused a lot of this nonsense. It spread like a plague. 3:10
This happens in California all the time. People make their living by suing businesses.
Lawyers. Pfft.
KGW made a google forum on their website to ask for more businesses to report this plausible deniability. There wasn't any resources provided, so it seems that lawyer is right, and there really isn't any other protections other than "ask me bro" when it comes to not being actively discriminated against as a disabled person through lack of access in Portland. Being a victim shouldn't be the predicate to being your educator. Accidents don't simply create teachers.
On that note, did you get a release for the homeless people you filmed, but couldn't bear to mention? Or do you lie to bend the law around this, and say, "well technically, they walked in front of my camera, its public space and they happen to be there, so this is legal." You do that, yet you would call the cops if I just filmed you in 4K all day outside your door. Just an example of how you see the homeless as something different than the human you are, rather than the same.
You're no stranger to seeing the homeless as subhuman and this story took it to a whole new low when you refused to even SAY it. You'll show the footage, but homeless people, are not even worth the tip of your tongue. Despite being worth it to have your Van crew pile out to capture B-roll. How can you claim to be doing anything but racketing businesses? What you care about is that this lawsuit money isn't being spent on shopping, instead of making disabled people happier. Why is that so offensive to you?
Because if you started giving disabled people rights, you'll give homeless people rights, because many homeless people are disabled. And there we see the true reason you're reporting this story. Further driving American divisions between disabled people, through a class war of their rights, as measured by their housing status.
In Conclusion, KGW, you're filming homeless people, without their consent, for the purpose of taking their rights away in this news story. I don't think that's ethical.
The only disabled people that matter to you are the ones with the housing, and access to sue the city, using the very ADA protections you're now calling litigious if used by customers of a store. A demand letter is instead of a lawsuit, but you're conflating the two to make these accurate violations seems more extreme. She won her lawsuit because she's a "taxpayer", a privilege the homeless don't get. Yet, homeless and housed people all use stores.
You hate homeless people so much you're bending over backwards with this story to justify filming homeless people, yet not recognize the insight you could have had in doing so, and realizing those people are disproportionally disabled, and effectively given an inverse of the ADA demand letter. The property owner could fix their property, the homeless had to vacate. You were so close to realizing this. So, now realizing what you've done, you should issue and apology.
Especially when otherwise, you are the media, and are not choosing this story as a part of your ongoing ADA coverage. It's your ongoing homeless-hate coverage. If you really cared about disabled people, where is you continued empathy helping those paraplegics "nicely ask" the businesses to stop being implicitly biased against disabled people? You created a mechanism, the google forum, with the intention of the opposite, to create FUD around filing ADA claims.
Even this prolific lawyer often fails, per your own coverage. Doesn't that beget that even the ADA laws themselves are lacking? Or like you mentioned, that there lacks mechanisms for disabled people to have their voice heard? You are creating the problem in this matter by not elevating the voice of the disabled, but the businesses that, I understand while they're not morally, sometimes, in the wrong, these businesses ARE in violation as a matter of fact.
And Major Gas Stations backed by Oil Companies, or other mecha-landlords in Portland, are not really the "small business" anyone can sympathize with. That's why other commenters are completely correct to invoke that these property owners are both gifted the privileges, and the responsibilities, of land ownership.
Why you then attack the lawyer's credibility, as a means to, in proxy, attack the legitimacy of this plaintiffs disability, claiming they just want a payout, you are creating the very systemic discrimination that make it so that disabled people had to codify their rights into law to signify they, too, are humans who deserve respect. The lawsuits are otherwise entirely accurate, and you have no reason to become incredulous at the legitimacy of this person's disability.
You are creating fakebook content ripe for dividing disabled people on the merit of their access to housing. If you cared about disabled people, you'd not refuse to mention that the homeless you cleared, are often there because they are disabled too, and are unable to get the same help this woman got under the same ADA laws, because they have no housing.
Thanks for taking away what little rights disabled homeless people have, by actively creating a form and running a defense, giving all businesses plausible deniability to discriminate against anyone they would like under a "just ask me bro" policy which in reality, only upholds entrenched ideologies.
Your story isn't just wrong, it's actively harmful, should be removed, and you should apologize.
Firstly, they have a right to film people in public. Secondly, what makes you assume that *all* homeless people are disabled? And what makes you think homeless disabled people should get *more* rights then a homeowner who has to *pay taxes* extorted to our local corrupt government ? This is the dystopia that leftists want, big brother government, shut down all the small businesses and nothing gets to run but corporations. Don't you remember what happened during covid and what businesses were considered essential? Land ownership isn't a privilege it's a right! With all your big words and lack of knowledge in the *real world* I would guess that you are college "educated", simply asking for an apology is just mere virtue signaling at its finest, not really solving an actual solution of getting these people housing. I bet most of these plantiffs never stepped foot/ wheeled into any of these businesses and are illegally being bribed. This is just a cash grab which can essentially put already struggling small businesses out of business for good.
@@allouttabubblegum1984 you don't care about people with disabilities when you use handicaps as insults against other people on your online account, or in your own words; 🤡
Message I just got back;
"Whether or not you have a physical disability it appears to me that you suffer from the worst disability of all--paralysis from the neck up.
Sincerely,
Tiana Tozer"
The ADA was signed into law in 1990. All ADA compliance deadlines for older properties and small companies ended in 2011. Why are these businesses thinking they can get away with not having something as necessary as a marked disabled parking spot in 2024? This is ridiculous! I don’t even live in Portland and I’m frustrated with this situation. They’ve had multiple decades to get compliant. I don’t have any empathy for these businesses owners at all. I do have a lot of empathy for their disabled customers.
You have a point, but it's also messed up that there's so many tents blocking off sidewalks.
@@allouttabubblegum1984 sure. Let’s deal with that by getting some housing for those folks. They are people.
@@OrangeCat1992since you want to provide housing for everyone, why don’t you start by inviting a few homeless people to live with you?
@@rw4022 I worked for a housing authority for 13 years. I’ve literally helped thousands of people get affordable housing and homeless programs. What have you done?
@@OrangeCat1992 I haven’t done anything and I don’t plan on it. I worked since I was 15, sometimes working multiple jobs at the same time just to get by, and never let drugs and alcohol become a part of my life. You are advocating for tax payers to pay for others to live in homes, so I think you should house people in your home instead of spending our hard earned money.
If the businesses understand the need for accessibility, why are they waiting until they get the letters before they bring it up to code?
Why should a person have to have that first access exclusion experience?
Not a fan of the style, but reporting on it might light a fire and get them to be proactive.
Then we can start working on government agencies that hold events in non accessible locations.