The Supreme Court refused on Aug. 10 to dismiss an appeal brought by a litigious litigant opposing counsel accused of participating in “an unethical extortionate scheme,” after the woman asked the court to throw out the case.
The refusal also came after one of the woman’s attorneys was recently disciplined by a lower court for professional misconduct in connection with that so-called scheme. The opposing counsel has accused her legal team of committing fraud.
The respondent, Deborah Laufer, is a self-identified civil rights “tester” who challenges hotels’ failure to make information about accessibility to disabled people publicly available, even though she has no intention of visiting the hotels she targets.
Ms. Laufer, who has vision problems and physical disabilities, has brought hundreds of lawsuits against hotels across the country under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a 1990 federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. The law requires hotels to post information online about their accessibility to people with disabilities.
Ms. Laufer brought a lawsuit in U.S. district court in Maine against Acheson Hotels under Title III of the ADA, alleging the hotel operator “engaged in unlawful disability discrimination when it failed to provide accessibility information on its online reservation website or in its listings with third-party reservation services.”
The district court sided with the hotel company, holding that Ms. Laufer lacked legal standing to proceed because she did not actually intend to visit the hotel and therefore could not be harmed by the paucity of website information.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit disagreed and reinstated the lawsuit, concluding that the denial of accessibility information was adequate grounds for the legal action.
‘Boilerplate’ Lawsuits
Meanwhile, after Ms. Laufer filed suit, the hotel company updated the accessibility information, a move the Biden administration argued in a June 12 brief may have mooted the case pending before the Supreme Court.Then on July 5, attorney Tristan Gillespie, local counsel in Maryland working for Ms. Laufer’s then-attorney, Thomas Bacon of Orlando, Florida, on her various ADA lawsuits, was suspended from practicing law for six months by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland for professional misconduct related to those lawsuits.
A three-judge panel issued a report days before on Mr. Gillespie’s conduct in filing more than 600 ADA lawsuits on behalf of Ms. Laufer and another individual.
“The report stated that Gillespie filed boilerplate ADA lawsuits against hotels for failing to provide sufficient accommodation information online. He immediately pushed for settlements that would award him high attorney fees. Gillespie routinely exaggerated time spent drafting near-identical complaints, billing over two hours for work that took minutes,” ALAB News, a publication that covers attorney misconduct, reported on Aug. 1.
“The disciplinary order concludes that Mr. Gillespie violated his ethical duty to keep his clients informed, his duty of candor to the court, and his duty of candor and fairness to opposing counsel,” Ms. Corkran wrote.
Dismissed ‘With Prejudice’
Even though Ms. Laufer “has not engaged in any improper conduct and continues to believe that her claims against Acheson and other hotels are meritorious, she recognizes that the allegations of misconduct against Mr. Gillespie could distract from the merits of her ADA claims and everything she has sought to achieve for persons with disabilities like herself. She accordingly has decided to dismiss all of her pending cases with prejudice,” Ms. Corkran wrote in her brief.When a court agrees to dismiss a lawsuit “with prejudice,” the lawsuit is deemed to have been adjudicated on the merits and the plaintiff is not allowed to refile the same claim again in that court.
Ms. Corkran argued the Supreme Court should dismiss the case because there is no longer a live controversy for the justices to decide.
He added that “Thomas Bacon, who until this week was Laufer’s counsel of record in this Court, engaged in a remarkable fraud against the American judicial system.”
Although Mr. Gillespie was sanctioned by the district court, “the order made clear that Bacon perpetrated the fraud … Gillespie appears to have acted largely at the direction of his boss, Thomas B. Bacon,” with whom he has since cut ties.
‘An Audacious Plan’
“In response to these revelations, Laufer has hatched an audacious plan. Laufer has decided to abandon her case against Acheson in an effort to persuade this Court not to decide the question on which it granted certiorari: whether Laufer had standing to bring her suit,” Mr. Unikowsky wrote.“Laufer is abandoning her case to pave the way for Laufer and similar plaintiffs to resume their campaign of extortionate ADA suits against unwitting small businesses without the hindrance of an adverse ruling from this Court. The Court should not reward Laufer’s effort to insulate lower-court rulings upholding ‘tester’ standing from Supreme Court review,” the attorney wrote.
“Moreover, rewarding Laufer’s strategy would be extraordinarily unfair to Acheson. Acheson is a small business that has expended significant time and money fighting to vindicate its position that Laufer’s lawsuits are unconstitutional. If the Court dismisses the case, Acheson faces the risk of being sued again. The Court should not pull the rug out from under Acheson when it is on the cusp of its day in this Court.”
The order continued, “The question of mootness will be subject to further consideration at oral argument in addition to the question” of Ms. Laufer’s standing to bring the lawsuit.
No justices dissented from the order.
The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Ms. Corkran and Mr. Unikowsky.
The lawyers have yet to respond.
