News
by Kevin Forestieri / Mountain View Voice
Uploaded: Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 1:50 pm 13
Updated: Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 1:30 pm
Time to read: about 6 minutes
Downtown Palo Alto restaurant Tai Pan, seen here on Aug. 9, 2021, is one of hundreds of Bay Area businesses facing an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuit. Photo by Adam Pardee
Things were looking pretty good last month for Tai Pan, a downtown Palo Alto restaurant known for its Cantonese dim sum. State officials lifted COVID-19 restrictions at the start of summer, and business was finally picking up again as friends — long parted — were reuniting over good food.
The positive outlook was shattered on July 21, however, when Tai Pan received a lawsuit stating that the restaurant was discriminatory. Its outdoor dining tables, set up for pandemic safety and the preferred option for customers, allegedly lacked enough space for wheelchair access under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Tony Han, who runs Tai Pan with his family, said he was shocked to learn that these ADA lawsuits are not only common, but that an extraordinary number of businesses have been hit with similar allegations in just the last two months. The Chinese restaurant Taste, just down the street, got hit with a lawsuit the next week, followed by Singaporean eatery Killiney Kopitiam just days later.
To Han, the stream of lawsuits has soured the feeling of recovering from the pandemic.
“The last year was so difficult and probably the hardest year that everyone has ever worked in this industry,” Han said. “So everyone was on this high, and all of the sudden this thing happened.”
Help sustain the local news you depend on.
Your contribution matters. Become a member today.
So far this year, more than 1,400 ADA lawsuits have been filed in Northern California’s district court, primarily targeting businesses located in the Bay Area. Of those lawsuits, 686 have been filed by the same plaintiff, Scott Johnson, a man who is quadriplegic and who has sued close to 100 businesses in Palo Alto and Mountain View alone. The list and range of businesses targeted is broad, including national chains like Subway and Chili’s, along with small locally owned restaurants like Don Giovanni and Doppio Zero in downtown Mountain View.
Along with restaurants, smaller cafes like Alexander’s Patisserie and Maison Alyzée have been hit with lawsuits, and grocery stores, including the Nob Hill on Grant Road, have also been served. Johnson has sued auto repair shops, hair salons, liquor stores and even a welding shop, Praxair Welding Gas and Supply on Old Middlefield Way. A list of Midpeninsula businesses facing lawsuits can be found here.

In most cases, businesses facing ADA lawsuits are doomed to lose in court, and instead seek to correct the violation and pay a settlement that can be as high as $26,000. Despite the cost, many see it as a small price to pay compared to fighting a long, losing battle.
Han said he hasn’t decided how to respond to the lawsuit, but he said there’s a sense of injustice to the serial litigation. Business owners are angry, he said, because they go out of their way to accommodate people with wheelchairs and other access-related disabilities. Many, including Tai Pan, don’t remember someone with a wheelchair and a service dog attempting to eat at their restaurant during the months Johnson allegedly ran into these ADA-related roadblocks.
What restaurant employees at Tai Pan do remember, Han said, is a man coming by the restaurant and casing the outdoor tables with measuring tape right around the time Johnson allegedly visited the restaurant. He believes the lawsuit is simply a way to extract settlement money from businesses that can scarcely afford it right now.
Find out what’s on the ballot in Mountain View.
Find out what’s on the ballot in Mountain View.
“It is absolutely a shakedown, it’s extortion by all means.”
Tony Han, who runs Tai Pan with his family, is photographed at the restaurant on Aug. 9, 2021. Han is working with other local businesses that are reeling from a spate of ADA lawsuits. Photo by Adam Pardee
Sandy Liu, owner of Taste, said her restaurant experienced something similar. Nobody recalls a man in a wheelchair trying to eat at the restaurant, but they do remember someone carefully observing the outdoor patio from the sidewalk — something that apparently amounts to a “visit” under the lawsuit. She worries that the alleged ADA violation may have had something to do with the outdoor seating arrangement permitted by the city under COVID-19, and that the city may have some responsibility for the multiple lawsuits.
Liu, like Han, said she still doesn’t know exactly how to respond to the lawsuit, but she said businesses can’t afford to deal with legal fees and a high-cost settlement.
“We are facing so many challenges to survive since COVID,” she said. “Our restaurant business is dropping like crazy.”
Though Johnson is an attorney and listed as the plaintiff, the lawsuits are being spearheaded by a San Diego-based law firm called Potter Handy, LLP, which specializes in ADA litigation through an arm of the company called the Center for Disability Access. Dennis Price, an attorney with the center, said in an interview last month that all of the lawsuits are well-founded and based on factual violations, and that Johnson did in fact try to patronize these businesses and found they were noncompliant with the ADA.
Most Viewed Stories
■ Plan to restore Baylands site as parkland divides environmentalists
■ Thousands turn out for Mountain View’s annual Monster Bash
■ Sheriff Laurie Smith retires as jury deliberates at her corruption trial
■ Looming physicians strike averted with tentative contract agreement
Most Viewed Stories
■ Plan to restore Baylands site as parkland divides environmentalists
■ Thousands turn out for Mountain View’s annual Monster Bash
Price said defense attorneys will sometimes whip their client into a frenzy about Johnson’s motives, but that these cases are a clear-cut effort to improve disability access and implement the 30-year-old federal law as it was intended. Serial litigation from private citizens, despite its bad rap, is the only way to push compliance on a large scale.
“Part of Mr. Johnson’s purpose is to vindicate the ADA the way Congress created it,” he said. “It relies on private enforcement, and that is what Mr. Johnson has done.”
In the vast majority of cases, Price said there is an objective violation that’s pretty hard to contest. Grocery store aisles need enough clearance to travel through in a wheelchair, restaurant tables need to meet certain measurement requirements and parking spaces must meet rigid standards that go far beyond painting the pavement blue.
The pandemic has been particularly brutal for those with disabilities, Price said, and people with reduced lung capacity were essentially forced into house arrest. Johnson himself got COVID-19 and nearly died from it, he said, and adjustments made during the pandemic to accommodate outdoor activities and social distancing often created barriers for people with mobility-related issues.
“The world presumes an awful lot of things about people who are going to patronize businesses, and what’s important and what’s not,” Price said. “It’s easy to write these things off or call them a technical violation, but sometimes it’s the difference between going out and staying home.”
On a recent webinar hosted by the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, real estate lawyer Ken Van Vleck said these lawsuits are not frivolous, and most of the infractions cited are in fact violations of the ADA that need to be addressed. Oftentimes the question is not whether a business is going to lose the case, but how badly and at what cost. Protracted litigation is something plaintiffs’ attorneys want, Vleck said, and that can run the cost up to $100,000.
“If your initial reaction is to kick and scream and fight and put up a lot of trouble for them, it’s going to cost you more to settle the case,” he said. “It is inadvisable, in my opinion, to say this case is a loser but we’re going to fight it anyway because we want to make a point and then settle it a year later — that just doesn’t make sense.”
It can differ from lease to lease, but it’s usually the business tenant that’s on the hook for maintaining ADA compliance, though landlords can be sued instead of or along with the tenant. And if the landlord has to make expensive fixes to satisfy the ADA, those costs can be passed down to the tenants.
Even businesses that have closed during the pandemic and have been served with a lawsuit can still be liable for damages, said attorney Martin Orlick.
Many businesses opt to quietly settle with Johnson and make the problem go away as quickly as possible, but Han said the recent avalanche of lawsuits has prompted him to publicly take action. Over the last few weeks he has been connecting with other affected business owners and consulting with five different law firms to find some way to prevent costly litigation on such a massive scale from happening again. He believes the city has a role to play, and could offer to pay for inspections to ensure local businesses comply with the ADA before getting served with lawsuits.
Han said many of the law firms he’s talked to specialize in ADA lawsuits and know Potter Handy and Johnson well, but he and other business owners are wary of the advice they’re given. They promise a fast settlement in the cheapest way possible, but they also stand to benefit from these court cases.
“Obviously there’s a lot of distrust going around. These guys are just playing the same game, they’re on the other side of the same coin. But what else are you going to do?” Han said.
Since getting the word out about the lawsuit, Han said there’s been an outpouring of support from customers at Tai Pan. One of them, a lawyer from Minnesota, said he also faced an ADA lawsuit and recommended that Han fight back. Others talked about ADA lawsuits like they’re a necessary evil and something that’s been normalized over time, which he believes is a huge problem. It’s not normal to give businesses zero chances to fix these unapparent accessibility problems, he said, and it’s something that ought to change.
“The more you make this type of behavior seem normal, the more this is just going to get out of control,” Han said, pointing to the hundreds of newly filed cases. “This is literally out of control right now.”
Craving a new voice in Peninsula dining?
Sign up for the Peninsula Foodist newsletter.
Follow Mountain View Voice Online on Twitter @mvvoice, Facebook and on Instagram @mvvoice for breaking news, local events, photos, videos and more.

by Kevin Forestieri / Mountain View Voice
Uploaded: Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 1:50 pm
Updated: Wed, Aug 11, 2021, 1:30 pm

Things were looking pretty good last month for Tai Pan, a downtown Palo Alto restaurant known for its Cantonese dim sum. State officials lifted COVID-19 restrictions at the start of summer, and business was finally picking up again as friends — long parted — were reuniting over good food.
The positive outlook was shattered on July 21, however, when Tai Pan received a lawsuit stating that the restaurant was discriminatory. Its outdoor dining tables, set up for pandemic safety and the preferred option for customers, allegedly lacked enough space for wheelchair access under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Tony Han, who runs Tai Pan with his family, said he was shocked to learn that these ADA lawsuits are not only common, but that an extraordinary number of businesses have been hit with similar allegations in just the last two months. The Chinese restaurant Taste, just down the street, got hit with a lawsuit the next week, followed by Singaporean eatery Killiney Kopitiam just days later.
To Han, the stream of lawsuits has soured the feeling of recovering from the pandemic.
“The last year was so difficult and probably the hardest year that everyone has ever worked in this industry,” Han said. “So everyone was on this high, and all of the sudden this thing happened.”
So far this year, more than 1,400 ADA lawsuits have been filed in Northern California’s district court, primarily targeting businesses located in the Bay Area. Of those lawsuits, 686 have been filed by the same plaintiff, Scott Johnson, a man who is quadriplegic and who has sued close to 100 businesses in Palo Alto and Mountain View alone. The list and range of businesses targeted is broad, including national chains like Subway and Chili’s, along with small locally owned restaurants like Don Giovanni and Doppio Zero in downtown Mountain View.
Along with restaurants, smaller cafes like Alexander’s Patisserie and Maison Alyzée have been hit with lawsuits, and grocery stores, including the Nob Hill on Grant Road, have also been served. Johnson has sued auto repair shops, hair salons, liquor stores and even a welding shop, Praxair Welding Gas and Supply on Old Middlefield Way. A list of Midpeninsula businesses facing lawsuits can be found here.
In most cases, businesses facing ADA lawsuits are doomed to lose in court, and instead seek to correct the violation and pay a settlement that can be as high as $26,000. Despite the cost, many see it as a small price to pay compared to fighting a long, losing battle.
Han said he hasn’t decided how to respond to the lawsuit, but he said there’s a sense of injustice to the serial litigation. Business owners are angry, he said, because they go out of their way to accommodate people with wheelchairs and other access-related disabilities. Many, including Tai Pan, don’t remember someone with a wheelchair and a service dog attempting to eat at their restaurant during the months Johnson allegedly ran into these ADA-related roadblocks.
What restaurant employees at Tai Pan do remember, Han said, is a man coming by the restaurant and casing the outdoor tables with measuring tape right around the time Johnson allegedly visited the restaurant. He believes the lawsuit is simply a way to extract settlement money from businesses that can scarcely afford it right now.
“It is absolutely a shakedown, it’s extortion by all means.”
Sandy Liu, owner of Taste, said her restaurant experienced something similar. Nobody recalls a man in a wheelchair trying to eat at the restaurant, but they do remember someone carefully observing the outdoor patio from the sidewalk — something that apparently amounts to a “visit” under the lawsuit. She worries that the alleged ADA violation may have had something to do with the outdoor seating arrangement permitted by the city under COVID-19, and that the city may have some responsibility for the multiple lawsuits.
Liu, like Han, said she still doesn’t know exactly how to respond to the lawsuit, but she said businesses can’t afford to deal with legal fees and a high-cost settlement.
“We are facing so many challenges to survive since COVID,” she said. “Our restaurant business is dropping like crazy.”
Though Johnson is an attorney and listed as the plaintiff, the lawsuits are being spearheaded by a San Diego-based law firm called Potter Handy, LLP, which specializes in ADA litigation through an arm of the company called the Center for Disability Access. Dennis Price, an attorney with the center, said in an interview last month that all of the lawsuits are well-founded and based on factual violations, and that Johnson did in fact try to patronize these businesses and found they were noncompliant with the ADA.
Price said defense attorneys will sometimes whip their client into a frenzy about Johnson’s motives, but that these cases are a clear-cut effort to improve disability access and implement the 30-year-old federal law as it was intended. Serial litigation from private citizens, despite its bad rap, is the only way to push compliance on a large scale.
“Part of Mr. Johnson’s purpose is to vindicate the ADA the way Congress created it,” he said. “It relies on private enforcement, and that is what Mr. Johnson has done.”
In the vast majority of cases, Price said there is an objective violation that’s pretty hard to contest. Grocery store aisles need enough clearance to travel through in a wheelchair, restaurant tables need to meet certain measurement requirements and parking spaces must meet rigid standards that go far beyond painting the pavement blue.
The pandemic has been particularly brutal for those with disabilities, Price said, and people with reduced lung capacity were essentially forced into house arrest. Johnson himself got COVID-19 and nearly died from it, he said, and adjustments made during the pandemic to accommodate outdoor activities and social distancing often created barriers for people with mobility-related issues.
“The world presumes an awful lot of things about people who are going to patronize businesses, and what’s important and what’s not,” Price said. “It’s easy to write these things off or call them a technical violation, but sometimes it’s the difference between going out and staying home.”
On a recent webinar hosted by the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, real estate lawyer Ken Van Vleck said these lawsuits are not frivolous, and most of the infractions cited are in fact violations of the ADA that need to be addressed. Oftentimes the question is not whether a business is going to lose the case, but how badly and at what cost. Protracted litigation is something plaintiffs’ attorneys want, Vleck said, and that can run the cost up to $100,000.
“If your initial reaction is to kick and scream and fight and put up a lot of trouble for them, it’s going to cost you more to settle the case,” he said. “It is inadvisable, in my opinion, to say this case is a loser but we’re going to fight it anyway because we want to make a point and then settle it a year later — that just doesn’t make sense.”
It can differ from lease to lease, but it’s usually the business tenant that’s on the hook for maintaining ADA compliance, though landlords can be sued instead of or along with the tenant. And if the landlord has to make expensive fixes to satisfy the ADA, those costs can be passed down to the tenants.
Even businesses that have closed during the pandemic and have been served with a lawsuit can still be liable for damages, said attorney Martin Orlick.
Many businesses opt to quietly settle with Johnson and make the problem go away as quickly as possible, but Han said the recent avalanche of lawsuits has prompted him to publicly take action. Over the last few weeks he has been connecting with other affected business owners and consulting with five different law firms to find some way to prevent costly litigation on such a massive scale from happening again. He believes the city has a role to play, and could offer to pay for inspections to ensure local businesses comply with the ADA before getting served with lawsuits.
Han said many of the law firms he’s talked to specialize in ADA lawsuits and know Potter Handy and Johnson well, but he and other business owners are wary of the advice they’re given. They promise a fast settlement in the cheapest way possible, but they also stand to benefit from these court cases.
“Obviously there’s a lot of distrust going around. These guys are just playing the same game, they’re on the other side of the same coin. But what else are you going to do?” Han said.
Since getting the word out about the lawsuit, Han said there’s been an outpouring of support from customers at Tai Pan. One of them, a lawyer from Minnesota, said he also faced an ADA lawsuit and recommended that Han fight back. Others talked about ADA lawsuits like they’re a necessary evil and something that’s been normalized over time, which he believes is a huge problem. It’s not normal to give businesses zero chances to fix these unapparent accessibility problems, he said, and it’s something that ought to change.
“The more you make this type of behavior seem normal, the more this is just going to get out of control,” Han said, pointing to the hundreds of newly filed cases. “This is literally out of control right now.”
You forgot this.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Web Link
I am amazed at what I am reading here! So we have a law to help some of the most miserable among us and apparently cities like Shallow Alto (land of faux liberal causes) cannot be bothered to enforce it. People over at city hall are too busy securing their double or even triple pensions, apparently. So meanwhile this poor quadraplegic man and presumably some generous donors who are behind him has to do their jobs for them, to make sure that the poor, differently-abled can navigate the city. And this newspaper DARES to criticize him for it? For doing what the city is supposed, but are too lazy to do?! A quadraplegic man?! I can’t believe this! When did this newspaper move to the right of Trump? Please cancel my subscription to this useless rag. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
By the way, I think in the future we can expect a lot more of this kind of vigilante action as the the bureaucrats in city hall have proven over and over that they are simply not up to the job. When people were violating the mask laws, they didn’t lift a finger. When people were having their catalytic converters stolen they didn’t do a thing. If they won’t address problems we the people have to take the law into our own hands.
An absolute frivolous shakedown because of the “well intentioned” ADA. There should be no settlement, and at best, a “fixit” ticket to the businesses to try to reasonably comply.
The problem with this law is that the accused does not get a period of time in which to fix the issue. In the case of a table that is the wrong height, that can easily be fixed by getting a new table. But instead, the business owner is immediately hit with an expensive lawsuit that he can’t get out of.

What if the restaurant owner immediately replaced the table that is in question? Does this case go to court, does an independent authority come out to check on what the plaintiff has written as the dimensions of the table?

If the plaintiff didn’t even try to eat there, then this smacks of a racket to me.
We need to take the financial shakedown motivation out of this. No or minimal spoils for the winning plaintiff and lawyers if the business complies in a reasonable timeframe. We want compliance not legal shakedown.
Cities should provide an ADA compliance approval to all businesses BEFORE they open their business to put these bottomfeeder laywers out of business. ADA compliance is very complicated, there is no way a small business owner is a match for an scumbag attorney well versed in the fine print of ADA compliance. This scam has been going on for years now, (Google “Tanya Moore ADA”). It benefits nobody other than the bottom feeder lawyers. Two years ago Moore’s Mission Law attorneys sued multiple small businesses in Mountain View Ava’s Market, Blossom True Hardware and Taqueria La Espuela in Mountain View, forcing the businesses to pay a quick settlement or risk a lengthy and expensive trial (AKA EXTORTION) In other areas lawsuits have forced them out of business. Restaurants including the Omelette House in Mountain View, Jason’s Cafe in Menlo Park and San Jose’s Time Deli each shut down after being hit by an ADA suit. Web Link
And BTW, Tanya Moore’s license is STILL ACTIVE Tanya Eugene Moore #206683
Web Link

Unfortunately, there are some people using the ADA as a cash cow. This has been going on for many years and perhaps it is time that the ADA was redrafted to prevent lawsuits designed only to extort money. Of course, disabled individuals deserve to be treated with respect and should have readily accessible facilities. Standard building codes take care of the major issues, such as access to dining rooms, restrooms, height of toilets and hand sinks, etc. but the furnishings are provided by the owners and can fall foul of the law. It is doubtful that this “poor quadriplegic man” is the real victim here but is probably the front for one or more unscrupulous lawyers who offer him a cut of their profits – made at the expense of hard-working restaurateurs, not city hall. And guess what? They probably live in “Shallow Alto”.
While it might be a well-intentioned law, this is ABSOLUTELY a shakedown of businesses.

This particular law should have a caveat. If business is ordered to comply by a person who very well may not have actually tried to patronize them (because VERY few business people I have met won’t go out of their way to accommodate a disabled person), then, once the violation is corrected, the disabled person bringing the suit should be REQUIRED to patronize said business.

Johnson has been doing this to DOZENS of businesses. One of the businesses I ACTUALLY patronize was hit by one of his lawsuits, yet he hasn’t been seen since they had to do $20,000 worth of modifications to their entrance. Never mind that the business is an auto shop and could well have a wheelchair enter through a different door 10 feet away.

Mr. Johnson and the people who think this is a worthy cause likely failed the ethics portion of their law exams. God knows they need remedial work in that area.
Ah.. the good old ADA strikes again.

The only way to remedy this is to get rid of the ADA laws. They don’t work as intended and just make businesses vulnerable to lawsuits like we see here.

But good luck with that..
One interesting thing is that this guy has been charged with income tax fraud. Seems he paid no taxes on all these settlements. This is important. The guy’s a huckster. We must not discriminate against those with disabilities by assuming they can’t also be hucksters. If the guy isn’t actually trying to be a customer, that seems like fraud.
This is the same jerk that sued our business in Cupertino a few years ago. He just goes around trying to make a quick buck by claiming restaurants aren’t ADA-compliant. Just look at the number of lawsuits he’s filed. It’s obvious he’s using his handicap to make a quick buck. Sickening and heartless with no soul. I know of a restaurant owner in SF that he put out of business in the Sunset district because their small tiny restaurant could not modify their small 600 sq ft space to accommodate a wheel chair. That business was one of the neighborhood’s favorites for many, many years and this soul-less person took it down. This is an absolute crime.
The article makes it sound like you can’t fight back. That’s not entirely true. David Wong, an attorney up in Berkeley, has gotten a federal case dismissed against Scott Johnson. Scott Johnson’s lawyers tried to keep the case going in federal court but the judge dismissed it. David Wong’s number is 415 355 4798.
Perhaps a limit of ten or so businesses that any one disabled person could sue?
Don’t miss out on the discussion!
Sign up to be notified of new comments on this topic.
Home
News
TownSquare
Blogs
A&E
Community Calendar
Home & Real Estate
Obituaries
Send News Tips
Subscribe
Print Edition/Archives
Express / Weekend Express
Special Pubs
Circulation & Delivery
Promotions
About Us
Contact Us
Advertising Info
Terms of Use
Privacy Policy
 
Palo Alto Online
The Almanac
TheSixFifty.com
Redwood City Pulse
© 2022 Mountain View Online
All rights reserved.
 
Embarcadero Media
 
PR MediaRelease
Sponsored content
Mobile site
© 2022 Mountain View Online. All rights reserved.

source