ADA Compliance and the Continuing Challenge of Internet and Website Accessibility

Marty Orlick's practice, encompassing more than 30 years, focuses primarily on real estate transactions and litigation. He is a member of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers and is on the Advisory Board of Directors of the Advanced Commercial Leasing Institute, Georgetown University Law Center. He serves as the Chair of JMBM's ADA Compliance & Defense Group and is the author of the ADA Compliance & Defense Blog.

His transactional practice includes leasing, lease administration for developers and tenants, acquisition and sales, portfolio management, regulation of real property use and development, eminent domain litigation and counseling, and abstracting lease portfolios, land use regulation and permitting, code compliance, lease termination negotiations, and public relations issues. He advises companies in a full range of ADA compliance.

His litigation experience includes trials and arbitration and covers a wide range of real estate matters including construction disputes, design professional liability cases and ADA defense.

His clients include financial institutions, developers, shopping center owners and retailers, hotels, restaurants, performing arts theaters, wineries and other business property owners.

Minh views her job as solving client problems in the most efficient and advantageous manner possible, whether the problem takes the form of a lawsuit, a Justice Department investigation, or a customer complaint.

Minh’s national practice focuses exclusively on the legal obligations of places of public accommodation, recipients of federal assistance, government contractors, and housing providers to individuals with disabilities under Title III of the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the Fair Housing Act (FHA), and various state non-discrimination statutes. Minh is a recognized thought leader on ADA Title III issues who is known for her practical and business-friendly approach to litigation and compliance under this law.

Minh leads the firm’s ADA Title III team—a group of more than 10 attorneys nationwide who focus their work on this law and handle a significant share of the more than 10,000 federal ADA Title III lawsuits filed each year. Minh knows all the players in the space and their strengths, weaknesses, and approaches to litigating and settling cases. This knowledge allows Minh to develop tailored defense strategies that often facilitate expeditious resolutions. With more than 18 years of experience in handling ADA Title III matters at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and in private practice, she can answer client questions efficiently. She also has the knowledge and judgment to provide clients with guidance on the application of the ADA to new technologies and products, and has provided this service to the country’s most innovative companies.

After graduating from law school, Minh spent nearly a decade as a litigator at one of the world’s top law firms, where she handled a variety of cases at all levels of the federal judicial system and before state and federal agencies. In 2001, Minh joined the DOJ where she served as Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. In that position, Minh oversaw the enforcement of the ADA, the FHA, the Rehabilitation Act, as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She also represented the DOJ at the US Access Board, the federal agency charged with creating accessibility guidelines for public accommodations, commercial facilities, and federal agencies. She returned to private practice in 2003, where she has focused her practice on Title III of the ADA and related laws.

In 2012, Minh authored the ADA Guide for Lodging Owners and Operators, the first book of its kind published by the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA). She also testified before Congress on behalf of the lodging industry on new ADA requirements for lifts at pools and spas. Minh is also the editor of and a primary contributor to Seyfarth’s ADA Title III News & Insights Blog. Minh has appeared on NPR and Fox Business as an ADA Title III leading subject matter professional, and she has been quoted in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, Bloomberg, The Economist, The American Banker, and The National Law Journal. In 2016, Anderson Cooper interviewed Minh for a 60 Minutes segment on ADA Title III litigation.

Richard is certified in Civil Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization and has tried jury and non-jury cases throughout the state of Texas since 1981. He has a national ADA and FHA defense practice that includes defending real estate developers, retailers, restaurants, shopping centers, banks, apartment owners and managers, hotels, single family developers and other enterprises in ADA and FHA litigation.

Richard also frequently consults on ADA and FHA compliance issues and presents webinars and seminars on avoiding and winning ADA and FHA lawsuits. He is an adjunct professor in Disability Law at the SMU Dedman School of Law, and his blog, “Accessibility Defense” serves as a resource nation-wide for hundreds of attorneys, accessibility experts and others involved in ADA and FHA litigation. In addition to his work on ADA and FHA accessibility issues Richard represents clients in disputes covering the entire spectrum of business related litigation.

William Goren is one of the country's foremost authorities on the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. For more than 20 years, he has been advising on ADA compliance as both an attorney and professor—of which during his time as a full-time academic at various institutions in Chicago, he won numerous teaching awards and achieved tenure.

With the goal of making the ADA/Rehabilitation Act and related laws understandable so that employers, governmental entities, businesses, and even individuals understand what it means to comply with the ADA/Rehabilitation Act and related laws, Mr. Goren provides consulting, counseling, representation, and training services to higher education institutions, public and private corporations, non-profit organizations, professional sports teams, government entities, and individuals. He also advises legal firms on a wide range of ADA matters. His approach favors prevention as a safeguard to costly litigation.

A licensed attorney in Georgia, Illinois and Texas, Mr. Goren also brings a deep, personal understanding of what it means to have a disability, equipping him with exceptional insight on how the ADA actually works. He is deaf with a congenital bilateral hearing loss of 65–90 decibels, but functions entirely in the hearing world thanks to hearing aids and lip reading. For reasons unrelated to his deafness, he uses voice dictation technology to access the computer.

Mr. Goren is the author of Understanding the Americans with Disabilities Act, Fourth Edition (published by the American Bar Association, 2013). A prolific writer and renowned researcher, Mr. Goren has penned numerous other articles on the rights of persons with disabilities and publishes a blog — an ABA Top 100 Legal Blawg for 2014 — on current topics related to ADA compliance.

Mr. Goren is founder, founding member, and was the first president of the National Association of Attorneys with Disabilities (NAAD). Mr. Goren is a member of the American Bar Association's General Practice and Solo Technology Committee (Vice Chair) and its Labor and Employment/Civil Rights Committee. He is a member of the Technology Committee of the Business Law Section and the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Committee of the Labor and Employment Section of the American Bar Association; a member of the Atlanta Bar Association; and a member of the DeKalb County Bar Association. Previously, Mr. Goren has served on the Illinois Standing Committee on Disability Law, the Texas Bar Standing Committee on Disability Issues committee, and was a co-chair of the Civil Rights/Constitutional Law committee of the Chicago Bar Association.

Mr. Goren received his B.A. from Vassar College, his J.D. from the University of San Diego, and his LL.M. in Health Law from DePaul University.