What should a Shopify brand tell its staff after an ADA demand letter arrives?
Tell the team the letter exists, what not to put in writing, and who the single point of contact is. Say nothing about fault, nothing about settlement, and nothing in a channel you would not read aloud in court.
The first team message
The first message after a demand letter arrives should come from the owner or the attorney, not from Slack gossip. Keep it short: the company received a legal letter about website accessibility, an attorney is handling it, and there is a short list of instructions everyone follows until told otherwise. Do not name the plaintiff's firm. Do not share the letter itself. Do not speculate about how strong the claim is. The goal of the message is to stop the rumor mill, not to start a book club.
The most common mistake is saying too much in the name of transparency. A founder who tells the team we are probably going to settle for fifteen thousand dollars has just created a witness to the settlement posture. A developer who writes in Slack that the site has been broken for months has just created an exhibit. Transparency about the process is good; transparency about the substance is dangerous. The process is: we got a letter, counsel is engaged, here are the rules.
Assign one point of contact for everything related to the letter, and route all questions through that person. Demand letters create a flurry of well-meaning activity: someone starts fixing the site, someone else emails the plaintiff's firm, a third person posts about it. Every one of those actions can hurt the case. One owner, one channel, and a clear statement that nobody acts on the letter without going through that owner first.
The writing freeze
From the moment the letter arrives, assume every written word about it could be read by the other side. That includes Slack, email, project tickets, commit messages, and group chats. Tell the team explicitly: do not discuss the letter, the plaintiff, the firm's demands, or anyone's opinion of the claim in writing. If it needs to be said, say it on a call with counsel present, or not at all.
This feels paranoid to teams that live in writing, and it is the single highest-value instruction you can give. Discovery in these cases routinely includes internal communications, and the plaintiff's attorney is looking for exactly the kind of casual message your team sends a hundred of a day. We knew about this. The site has always been like this. Legal says we should just pay. Each one is a sentence that costs real money. A writing freeze is not about hiding anything; it is about not manufacturing the other side's evidence.
Put the freeze in writing itself, once, from the attorney: effective immediately, no written discussion of the demand letter or the site's accessibility issues outside channels counsel designates. One message, then silence. The team will follow a clear rule from counsel far more reliably than a vague suggestion from the founder.
Who owns what
While counsel handles the legal response, someone has to own the website, and it should be exactly one person. That person freezes non-essential site changes, documents the current state of the cited pages, and coordinates any fixes counsel approves. Freezing changes matters because the fix timeline is evidence: you want a clean record of what the site looked like when the letter arrived and what changed after, with dates.
Customer support needs a script, because customers will keep arriving while this plays out. The script is simple: acknowledge accessibility feedback warmly, log it, escalate it to the owner. Support should never promise a fix date, never admit the site is non-compliant, and never mention the demand letter. A support agent who tells a customer we are being sued over accessibility has just expanded the blast radius for no reason.
Marketing needs a quieter version of the same instruction: no public statements, no blog posts about the company's accessibility journey, no social replies that characterize the claim. The time for the accessibility story is after the matter is resolved, told on your terms. During the matter, the only voice is counsel's, and counsel's voice says as little as possible.