Should a Shopify brand respond to an ADA demand letter before hiring an attorney?

The urge to reply immediately is strong and almost always wrong. Anything you put in writing before counsel is involved can become the plaintiff's best exhibit. Acknowledge receipt, say nothing substantive, and get a lawyer first.

The letter is designed to make you panic-reply

ADA demand letters arrive written to provoke a fast, emotional response. Short deadlines, legal jargon, dollar figures, and language about lawsuits are all calibrated to make a store owner pick up the phone or fire off an email the same day. That urgency is a tactic. The deadlines in demand letters are almost never real legal deadlines; they are pressure.

The most dangerous reply is the honest one. Store owners want to explain: we did not know, we will fix it, here is what we plan to do. Every sentence of that explanation is discoverable. Admitting you were unaware of accessibility obligations does not earn sympathy; it establishes the timeline of your knowledge. Promising fixes creates a record of what you considered broken. Silence, briefly, is safer than candor.

What to do in the first 48 hours instead

Three steps, none of which involve responding to the sender. First, preserve everything: the letter, the envelope or email headers, and a snapshot of the site as it exists today. Do not start changing the site yet. Changes made after receiving the letter look different legally than changes made before, and your attorney will want to sequence the remediation deliberately.

Second, engage counsel experienced in ADA website defense, not your general business attorney. This is a specialty with its own plaintiff firms, settlement ranges, and playbooks. An attorney who has handled fifty of these letters knows which senders negotiate and which ones file. That knowledge is worth more than any single response letter.

Third, tell your team to say nothing publicly and put nothing in writing about the letter except to counsel. A Slack message speculating about whether the site is actually accessible is discoverable. A customer service reply mentioning the letter is discoverable. Brief the team once: the letter exists, a lawyer is handling it, direct all questions to one person.

The one safe reply, and when to send it

There is exactly one communication that is safe before counsel drafts the real response: a brief acknowledgment of receipt. Something like: we received your letter dated X, we take accessibility seriously, and our counsel will respond. No admissions, no timelines, no discussion of the site's condition. Send it only if the letter demands a response on a short fuse and your attorney advises that silence would be worse.

In most cases your attorney will want to send the acknowledgment themselves, on letterhead, which carries more weight and keeps you out of the correspondence entirely. Let them. The value of a lawyer here is not just legal knowledge; it is distance. Every communication filtered through counsel is calmer, shorter, and less quotable than anything you would write at midnight.

The substantive response comes later and does two things: it addresses the claims without conceding them, and it describes remediation as an ongoing commitment rather than an admission of past failure. That framing is a legal craft. It is the reason you hired the specialist.

What not to do while you wait

Do not rush a remediation sprint to fix everything before responding. Counterintuitive, but hurried fixes create their own problems: undocumented changes, half-fixed issues, and a paper trail of panic. Your attorney will want remediation done properly, documented, and timed to support the legal strategy, not the anxiety.

Do not research the plaintiff's attorney online and then email them directly to negotiate. Serial ADA plaintiffs' firms handle these letters by volume, and an unrepresented store owner calling to haggle is the easiest file on their desk. Do not post about the letter anywhere, including founder communities and social media. And do not assume that ignoring it entirely is an option either. The letter has a strategy behind it. Your response needs one too, and that strategy starts with counsel, not with reply.