What should a Shopify brand do in the first 48 hours after an ADA demand letter?

Freeze the evidence, run a documented scan of the site as it stands today, and get counsel involved before anyone changes a line of code. The first two days do not decide the case, but they set the record everything else gets measured against.

Do not touch the site yet

The instinct is to fix everything overnight. Resist it. Changes made after a letter arrives are still worth doing, but they muddy the record of what the site looked like when the claim was filed. Run a full accessibility scan first and save the results with a timestamp. That snapshot is your baseline. It shows what the plaintiff actually encountered, and it lets counsel give advice grounded in facts instead of panic.

Document what you already have

Pull together every accessibility record you own: past audit reports, theme changelogs, records of fixes, any vendor statements about conformance. If you have been running continuous scans, export the history. If you have nothing, that is useful information too, because it tells counsel the real exposure. The worst outcome is discovering in week three that a developer ran an unlogged fix in week one.

Answer on counsel's timeline, not the filer's

Demand letters come with short deadlines because short deadlines produce fast settlements. Your lawyer may still respond quickly, but the response should come from them, not from a founder emailing apologies at midnight. A calm, documented acknowledgment beats a rushed promise to fix everything. Keep every reply in writing, keep the scan history running from day one, and start building the remediation file that makes the next conversation about facts instead of fear.