The Phriday Files

The numbers that matter

The map redrew itself

EcomBack's mid-year report counts 2,045 lawsuits in the first half of 2026 — up only 1.54% from 2,014 last year, which looks like a plateau until you open the state table. Illinois is the #1 lawsuit state for the first time ever: 463 suits (22.64% of everything), up 95.36% from 237. California moved up to #2 (424, +11.58%). New York collapsed from years at the top: 399 suits, down 37.36% — it lost 238 cases — and Florida fell 31.62% to #4. Indiana is the fastest-growing state in the country (+275%, 28 → 105). EcomBack's own caveat is the one to keep: the 2,045 figure is "a floor, not a ceiling" — demand letters and much of the state-court shift never show up in it. And here's the number that matters: had New York merely held flat, national filings would have risen 13.4%, not 1.5%. The lull is one state's standing fight, not the end of the wave.

Shopify crossed the 46% line

The platform table hit a milestone we've been tracking since Edition #2: 952 of those 2,045 suits — 46.55% — hit Shopify stores, up 45.8% in a year (653, 32.42%). That's the first time Shopify has passed custom-coded sites (661, 32.32%), and the two now account for 78.87% of all litigation. WordPress fell 34.2% (403 → 265, 12.96%); Wix nearly doubled (27 → 50); Magento halved; Salesforce Commerce Cloud went from 94 suits to zero. If there's a "default defendant" profile now, it's a Shopify store. Industry-wise, eight sectors absorbed 92.76% of everything — restaurants and food & beverage (593, 29.0%) plus lifestyle and apparel (565, 27.63%) together took 56.63% of all suits, and apparel overtook restaurants as the #1 sector in Q2.

Who's filing: two firms, 43.62% of everything

225 plaintiffs filed the half-year's cases, but 30 of them filed 1,035 — 50.61%. The most active, Michael Sandoval (Manning Law), filed 166 suits, up 45.6% from 114. At the firm level it's starker: ten law firms filed 1,648 cases — 80.59% of the total — and just two of them, Equal Access Law Group (526, more than double its 248 last year) and Manning Law (366), combined for 43.62% of every filing in the country. The firms that drove prior years' counts — Gottlieb (265 → 197), Stein Saks (211 → 124) — are being replaced, not joined. Practical read: the "serial filer" threat is now a two-firm story, and their filing patterns (industries, platforms, states above) are effectively a checklist of where not to be an easy target.

California's second front: CIPA

The same report counts 206 CIPA privacy lawsuits in California state courts in H1 — none federal, roughly half the state's ADA web volume. Two firms filed all of them: Pacific Trial Attorneys (113) and Brodsky Smith (93), with 90.8% landing in LA County Superior Court and June alone seeing 52. The claimed damages run $5,000 per violation, and these are the suits that pair tracking cookies with accessibility claims — the reason a consent banner that loads trackers before consent is now a two-front exposure. Two bills that would tighten this further (SB 690, AB 2564) are still pending in the legislature.

The widget number, cross-checked

One more mid-year number worth your attention: 496 suits — 24.25% — hit sites that already had an accessibility widget installed, up from 458 (22.74%) last year. That's EcomBack's methodology; UsableNet's August tracker, which counts differently, put the widget share at 31.0% (Edition #3). Different denominators, same direction, two independent sources — and the FTC's 2025 fine against accessiBe for compliance claims is the regulatory bookend. A widget is a tool, not a shield; the sued sites in both datasets had one running.

From the Phriday desk

Big week here: yesterday we shipped the Safety & Security Compliance Halo — one site audited against all five frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS v4.0, ISO 27001, EU AI Act) in one workspace, with combined and per-framework PDF reports. Alongside it, a gift to small business: the Cookie Compliance module is free forever — it detects your consent banner, measures which tracking cookies load before consent, inventories them, and checks your privacy link against seven consent principles. Three free scans every 30 days at phriday.app/cookie-compliance. And as always, the accessibility side stays free to start: scan your store in 60 seconds.

One fix before the weekend

The single most-cited barrier in the mid-year dataset is missing alt text. Fifteen minutes, this weekend: open your 10 best-selling products and write one plain sentence per product image — what the item is, from whose view ("Red canvas tote, front view, leather handles"). Not keywords, not the file name — the sentence you'd say out loud if a customer asked "what's in this picture." Screen readers read it to shoppers who can't see the image; search engines read it too. Bulk-editable in every platform's product admin, costs nothing, and it's the first thing both a plaintiff's scanner and a real customer will notice.

Sources: EcomBack 2026 Mid-Year ADA Website Lawsuit Report (Jan–Jun 2026, published Aug 2026); UsableNet ADA Lawsuit Tracker (August 2026, for the widget cross-check). EcomBack and UsableNet totals use different court-coverage methodologies and are not comparable to each other. Phriday Access provides monitoring and remediation guidance, not legal advice.

Phriday Access provides monitoring and remediation guidance, not legal advice. Next edition: Friday, September 25.