What should a Shopify brand do in the first 24 hours after an ADA demand letter arrives?
The first day after a demand letter sets the tone for everything that follows. Do not panic and do not ignore it: preserve evidence, get counsel involved, and avoid admissions before you know the facts.
Do not panic, and do not ignore it
An ADA demand letter arrives and the adrenaline says to act immediately. Both extremes are mistakes. Panicking leads to hasty site changes that can destroy evidence and admissions you cannot take back. Ignoring it lets a deadline pass and turns a manageable negotiation into a lawsuit. The first 24 hours are for orientation, not action: understand what you received, protect your position, and get the right people involved.
Nothing you do on day one needs to be heroic. It needs to be careful. The brands that fare best in these situations are the ones whose first-day moves preserve options instead of spending them.
Read the letter for what it actually says
Read the whole letter twice. Note the specific allegations: which pages, which barriers, which standard they cite. Note the sender: a law firm, an advocacy organization, an individual. Note the deadline: demand letters typically give 14 to 30 days to respond, and the clock starts at receipt. Calendar that date immediately.
Also note what the letter does not say. Vague letters that allege violations without naming pages or barriers are common, and they tell you something about the sender's diligence. Specific letters with screenshots and dates tell you something else. The specificity of the allegations shapes your entire response strategy, so catalog it precisely on day one.
Preserve everything before you touch anything
Before anyone changes a line of code, preserve the site as it exists right now. Capture full-page screenshots of every page named in the letter. Save the theme files. Export the accessibility scan history if you have monitoring in place. If the letter cites pages you no longer have, note that too, with the date they were removed.
This is the step most brands skip, and it is the one their lawyers wish they had not. Once you start fixing things, the pre-fix state is gone, and with it your ability to evaluate whether the allegations were even accurate. Preservation costs an hour. Reconstruction costs weeks and is never as convincing.
Do not reply substantively yet
It is tempting to respond right away, especially to a letter that feels unfair. Do not. Anything you write in the first 24 hours, before counsel is involved and before you know the facts, can become an exhibit. A defensive email admitting the site "has some issues we are working on" reads very differently in a courtroom than it felt in your inbox.
If the deadline is short and you need to buy time, a brief acknowledgment through counsel is fine: you received the letter, you are reviewing it, you will respond by a specific date. That is the entire day-one correspondence. Everything substantive waits until you have advice and facts.
Get counsel involved on day one
If you have an attorney with ADA digital accessibility experience, call them today. If you do not, finding one is the day-one task, not a next-week task. General business counsel can triage, but demand letter strategy benefits enormously from someone who has seen dozens of these and knows the plaintiff firms, the typical settlement ranges, and the defenses that actually work.
Loop in your accessibility vendor or agency at the same time, under counsel's direction if possible. You will need a technical assessment of the allegations: are the cited barriers real, on which pages, and what would remediation take. That assessment informs every strategic decision that follows, so start it immediately.
Take a snapshot, not a sledgehammer
Well-meaning teams sometimes respond to a demand letter with an overnight redesign or a bulk fix sprint. Resist this. Rapid, undocumented changes muddy the factual record: you can no longer show what the site looked like when the letter arrived, and rushed fixes introduce new issues that expand the dispute.
The right day-one technical move is assessment only. Run a fresh scan. Document the current state. Identify which allegations check out and which do not. Remediation comes later, as a planned program with records, not as a panicked weekend. A methodical response impresses opposing counsel far more than a frantic one.
Start a timeline document
Open a single document and log everything from this point forward: when the letter arrived, who has seen it, what was preserved and when, every conversation with counsel, every technical finding. Date every entry. This timeline becomes the backbone of your defense file.
It feels bureaucratic on day one. Six months later, when someone asks what happened in the first week, the timeline answers in seconds. Memory fades and staff turns over; the document does not. The brands that navigate demand letters well are rarely the ones with the fewest violations. They are the ones with the best records.