Yes — you can absolutely be sued twice (or more) over the same website’s accessibility, and it happens constantly. Settling one ADA lawsuit binds only that plaintiff; nothing stops a different person from filing a new suit over the same barriers, even while you are actively fixing them. According to UsableNet’s litigation tracking, 1,427 of the more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits filed in 2025 targeted companies that had already been sued — and in federal court, 46% of cases involved repeat defendants.

If you just settled your first case and are staring at a second demand letter, that number is cold comfort. But understanding why repeat suits happen points directly at the only thing that stops them. Here’s what the litigation data and the court records actually show.

Why settling one lawsuit doesn’t stop the next one

A settlement agreement is a private contract between you and one plaintiff. It resolves that person’s claim — and no one else’s. Title III of the ADA gives any person with a disability who encounters barriers on your site the right to sue, so a second plaintiff who hits the same broken checkout form has a fresh claim, no matter what you paid the first one.

There is no registry a settlement gets filed in, no shield it creates against strangers, and usually no court supervising it at all. Most ADA website cases settle early and are voluntarily dismissed, which means the court doesn’t even retain jurisdiction to enforce the deal. The only thing a settlement reliably buys is peace with that one plaintiff — for the term of the agreement.

That is not a loophole plaintiffs’ firms discovered recently. It is how private litigation works, and a federal appeals court spelled out the consequences in a case every twice-sued business owner should know about.

The case that settled it: Haynes v. Hooters

A business can be sued a second time over the same website even while it is remediating under a settlement from the first suit — that is the holding of Haynes v. Hooters of America. In 2016, a plaintiff named Gomez sued Hooters over its inaccessible website. Hooters settled within weeks, agreeing to bring the site up to WCAG 2.0 within twelve months. About six months into that remediation, a blind screen-reader user named Dennis Haynes sued Hooters over the same website.

The trial court threw Haynes’s case out as moot — Hooters was already fixing everything he complained about. But in June 2018 the Eleventh Circuit vacated that dismissal, ruling that “Hooters’ assurance to an unrelated third party to remediate its website does not alone moot Haynes’ claims for relief” (Haynes v. Hooters of America, LLC, No. 17-13170 (11th Cir. June 19, 2018)).

The court gave three reasons, and each one is a lesson:

  1. No proof of completion. Hooters said it was “in the process” of remediating, but there was “nothing in the record demonstrating that Hooters has successfully done so.” A remediation plan in progress is not a remediated website.
  2. The second plaintiff asked for more. Haynes wanted an injunction requiring Hooters to continually maintain an accessible site — something the first settlement never promised.
  3. He couldn’t enforce someone else’s deal. Haynes wasn’t a party to the Gomez settlement, so if Hooters quietly abandoned the plan, he’d have no recourse.

Notice what the court did not say: it did not say fixing your website is pointless. It said an unfinished fix, promised to somebody else, protects you from nobody.

How common are repeat ADA lawsuits?

Repeat lawsuits are now roughly half of all federal digital accessibility filings. In UsableNet’s 2025 full-year data, out of more than 5,000 lawsuits filed, 1,427 targeted previously sued companies, and 46 percent of federal cases involved repeat defendants. The year before was no better: UsableNet’s 2024 report counted 961 repeat lawsuits — over 40% of cases by its measure — and found one in four suits that year involved a company that plaintiffs had already sued.

UsableNet describes the pattern bluntly: a settlement, limited remediation, a new plaintiff, another filing — often within months. Plaintiff firms track litigation history and revisit companies that appear to have addressed only surface-level issues. Getting sued once doesn’t take you off the target list. Handled badly, it puts you on one. Our page on serial plaintiffs and the firms behind them covers who is doing the filing; this is why they keep coming back.

The overlay data tells the same story from another angle. UsableNet found no meaningful reduction in lawsuits against companies running accessibility widgets in 2025 — filings against widget users stayed steady all year, peaking above 150 cases in a single month, and some complaints alleged the widgets themselves interfered with screen readers. If your response to lawsuit number one was installing a widget, you have effectively pre-written the complaint for lawsuit number two. We’ve laid out the evidence on whether overlays work separately.

Can fixing your website actually end a lawsuit?

Yes — courts have dismissed ADA website suits as moot, but only when the fix was complete, documented, and durable before the ruling. The clearest example is Diaz v. Kroger. In June 2019, the Southern District of New York dismissed a claim against the grocery chain because Kroger had undertaken WCAG compliance work before the suit was even filed, had actually fixed every barrier named in the complaint, and submitted a sworn affidavit from a product design manager confirming the fixes and the company’s commitment to staying compliant (National Law Review).

The judge also rejected the plaintiff’s argument that website cases can never be moot just because sites constantly change — websites, she held, get the same mootness analysis as physical buildings. And as the defense bar noted at the time, what carried the day was evidence: an affidavit stating Kroger had “reviewed and remedied all of the alleged deficiencies” and committed to monitoring compliance going forward (Frankfurt Kurnit).

Put Haynes and Diaz side by side and the rule is plain. “We’re working on it” loses. “Here is dated proof that it’s done, and here is our commitment to keep it that way” can win. This is general information, not legal advice — mootness is fact-specific and varies by circuit, so run your situation past a lawyer. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and it’s the same in New York, Florida, and every other high-filing state.

The remediation evidence file: what to build while you fix

The difference between Hooters’ loss and Kroger’s win was documentation. If you’re remediating — whether after a suit or to prevent one — build the file as you go:

  1. A dated baseline audit. A real accessibility audit with manual and assistive-technology testing, not just a scanner report, establishing what was broken and when you found it.
  2. A remediation log. Every barrier, the WCAG 2.1 AA criterion it maps to, who fixed it, and the date it shipped. This is the document a second complaint gets checked against.
  3. Retest records. Proof each fix was verified — keyboard passes, screen-reader session notes, before-and-after results. In Diaz, specificity is what made the affidavit credible.
  4. A conformance report. A VPAT or ACR gives you a formal, structured statement of where the site stands.
  5. An accessibility statement with a contact path. It invites users to report problems to you instead of a law firm, and it documents your commitment.
  6. Ongoing monitoring reports. Haynes turned partly on maintenance — the plaintiff wanted the site kept accessible. Continuous monitoring is your evidence that it is.

None of this paperwork substitutes for the actual fix. It proves the fix — which, when plaintiff number two’s firm runs your site through its screening process, is exactly what you want them to find.

What makes a website a repeat target

Repeat defendants almost always share one of three traits: they fixed only the exact items in the first complaint, they let the site regress after fixing it, or they installed a widget and called it done. UsableNet’s finding that plaintiff firms “revisit companies that appear to have addressed only surface-level issues” is the whole game — the first lawsuit told them you settle, and your still-broken site tells them you’ll settle again.

Regression is the quiet one. A site that passed testing in March can fail by September after a redesign, a new plugin, or a batch of unlabeled product images. The second plaintiff doesn’t care that you were compliant once. That’s why the durable answer is never a one-time cleanup: it’s full remediation of the underlying code followed by a process that keeps new content accessible — the approach we’ve outlined in how to avoid an ADA lawsuit. And since a second suit means a second settlement, a second legal bill, and a second round of plaintiff’s attorney’s fees, the math favors fixing it properly once.

The bottom line

One lawsuit is bad luck plus a broken website. Two lawsuits is just the broken website. The law lets any barred user sue, the data shows plaintiff firms deliberately re-target past defendants, and the court records show exactly what separates businesses that get dismissed from businesses that get sued again: a genuinely conformant site and the evidence file to prove it.

If you’ve been sued once, the highest-value move you can make today is finding out what a second plaintiff’s tester would find right now. Run a free accessibility scan — it takes a minute, and it’s the first page of your evidence file.