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Seyfarth Synopsis: Missouri lawmakers provide Missouri residents and the Missouri Attorney General with a new tool to combat abusive website accessibility lawsuits, effective August 28, 2026.
In early May, the state of Missouri enacted a new law – which becomes operative on August 28, 2026 – to protect Missouri “residents” from abusive lawsuits alleging inaccessible websites or web content. Missouri ranked sixth in the nation for 2025 website lawsuit filings in our annual review, with 86 such suits, compared to the leader, New York, which had 1,021. A closer look at the Missouri federal and state court dockets revealed that one plaintiff (represented by a single firm) was responsible for every single one of the 121 website accessibility lawsuits filed in 2024 and 2025.
The new law authorizes a defendant that is a Missouri resident in a lawsuit alleging that the defendant’s website or web content fails to provide sufficient access under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or similar state laws (a “Web Access Suit”) can file its own civil action in any court of “competent jurisdiction” against the plaintiff and/or the plaintiff’s attorneys who brought the Web Access Suit to determine if the Web Access Suit is “abusive litigation.” The law defines “abusive litigation” as litigation whose primary purpose “is obtaining a payment from a defendant due to the costs of defending the action in court.”
The law also empowers the Missouri Attorney General to bring a civil action on behalf of Missouri residents – or intervene in a pending action—against abusive litigation.
To determine if litigation is abusive, courts will consider the “totality of the circumstances.”
The law specifies the following factors to be considered:
(a) Whether the same plaintiff, attorney, or law firm has filed a high number of substantially similar lawsuits without meaningful efforts to resolve or improve accessibility;
(b) Whether the plaintiff provided the defendant with reasonable notice and an opportunity to correct the alleged barrier(s) prior to filing suit;
(c) Any history of sanctions or findings of bad faith against the plaintiff or counsel;
(d) The nature of settlement discussions and the reasonableness of settlement offers and refusals to settle;
(e) Whether any factors under Missouri Supreme Court Rule 55.03(b) exist in the litigation (e.g. filing for an “improper purpose” such as harassment or to increase litigation costs, or without evidentiary support) and whether sanctions are appropriate under Missouri Supreme Court Rule 55.03(c).
Notably, the law establishes a rebuttable presumption that litigation is abusive if a defendant “receives written notice of an alleged website or web content access violation and in good faith initiates substantial steps to correct it within ninety days.” This rebuttable presumption essentially forces plaintiffs to give defendants ninety days to fix any alleged violations before filing a lawsuit about the violations. Otherwise, the lawsuit would be presumptively considered abusive litigation.
If a court finds the Web Access Suit to be abusive, it can order the plaintiff and plaintiff’s attorneys in the Web Access Suit to pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees and costs to defend that lawsuit, as well as the fees and costs it incurred in prosecuting the lawsuit authorized by the new Missouri law. A court may also order punitive damages or sanctions against the law firm and plaintiff that filed the abusive lawsuit, not to exceed three times the amount of attorney’s fees awarded by the court.
It will be very interesting to see whether this new law will have any deterrent effect on Web Access Suit plaintiffs and their lawyers, or whether any defendants in Web Access Suits will use it as a counteroffensive measure. Defendants may hesitate to pursue claims under this statute, given the added legal costs and the prospect of litigating on two separate fronts. The Missouri Attorney General has far greater resources and could make a meaningful impact by pursuing actions against plaintiffs and their attorneys under this law.
Kansas enacted a similar abusive website litigation law in 2023 and we have not been able to find any lawsuits filed under it. That is not surprising, however, given Kansas’ minimal ADA Title III website lawsuit activity, even before the Kansas law was passed. We shall see how it goes in Missouri.
Edited by: Kristina M. Launey
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