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The Demand-Letter Economy
How serial litigation turns small compliance gaps into settlements, across ADA, copyright, TCPA and more.
Most website "compliance" risk never reaches a courtroom. It arrives as a letter — a pre-suit demand engineered to make settling cheaper than fighting. Understanding that business model is the key to defending against it.
The playbook is the same across every category
- Automate detection: a crawler scans thousands of sites for one specific, provable defect — an unlicensed image, a missing accessibility feature, a pre-consent tracker, a marketing text to a wrong number.
- Anchor to a big statutory number: copyright up to $150,000 per registered work; CIPA $5,000 per violation; TCPA $500–$1,500 per message; ADA fees plus remediation. The demand cites the ceiling to make the "discount" settlement feel reasonable.
- Make settling rational: the ask (often a few thousand dollars) is set below the cost of hiring a lawyer to fight — so paying is the logical move, which is the entire point.
Who runs it, by category
- Copyright: Getty Images / PicRights, tens of thousands of automated letters a year, $750–$5,000 per image escalating on silence.
- ADA accessibility: a concentrated set of plaintiffs' firms filing thousands of near-identical complaints; 46% of 2025 federal cases were repeat defendants.
- CIPA privacy: serial filers running headless-browser scans for pre-consent pixels, anchored to the $5,000 penalty.
- TCPA: class-action firms mining marketing texts sent without proper consent.
Why prevention wins
Every one of these depends on a defect the crawler can see and prove. Remove the defect and you remove the evidence — a fixed site never shows up in the automated dragnet that generates the letter in the first place. That's the cheapest legal strategy there is.
Educational overview, not legal advice. A scan surfaces signals; it does not certify compliance.
Sources
- UsableNet 2025 reports
- PicDefense / Heitner Legal (copyright demands)
- National Law Review (TCPA)
- Fisher Phillips, Holland & Knight (CIPA)
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