Missouri Just Passed a Law Aimed at 'Gotcha' Website Lawsuits, Here's Why That Still Matters to You

A new Missouri statute takes effect August 28 and gives businesses a real shot at fighting back against mass-filed accessibility demand letters. It only covers Missouri, but the pattern it targets is national.

What Missouri actually passed

Missouri's governor signed the new statute this spring, formally titled Act Against Abusive Website Or Web Content Access Litigation, and it becomes operative on August 28, 2026. The law does not touch the underlying accessibility standard that websites are expected to meet. What it changes is the legal environment around how those claims get filed and fought.

The core mechanism is a cure period. If a business gets written notice that its site has an accessibility problem and, in good faith, takes substantial steps to fix it within 90 days, courts must presume the lawsuit is abusive rather than legitimate. Judges can still weigh other factors too, like whether the same plaintiff and firm have filed a stack of near-identical suits, or whether the case looks aimed at a quick settlement rather than an actual fix.

The pattern that pushed lawmakers to act

This did not come out of nowhere. Missouri logged 86 website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, the sixth-highest total of any state, and one plaintiff working with a single law firm was behind every one of the 121 such suits filed in Missouri across 2024 and 2025 combined. That is not a wave of different customers running into real barriers. It is a template, filed at volume.

The broader playbook is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a demand letter: an automated scan flags missing alt text or a form field without a label, a letter goes out asking for a settlement in the low five figures, and most businesses pay rather than fight because litigation costs more than the ask. Missouri's law is a direct response to that math, giving defendants a formal way to say the fix already happened before the case gets any further.

What happens if a business does not fix it

The law is not a free pass to ignore a demand letter. If a court finds a lawsuit was legitimately filed and the business genuinely failed to remedy a real accessibility barrier, the case proceeds normally. The protection only kicks in when a business responds in good faith within the 90-day window.

On the other side, if a court determines the litigation itself was abusive, defined roughly as litigation aimed at extracting a settlement rather than fixing an access problem, it can award the defendant's attorney fees and costs, plus punitive damages up to three times those fees. Missouri's attorney general also gets independent authority to pursue enforcement against abusive filing patterns, separate from any individual defendant's case.

Why this matters even outside Missouri

Nevada, and most other states, do not have anything like this on the books yet. If your site gets a demand letter here, there is no 90-day statutory cure window doing the work for you, and the underlying accessibility bar under Title III of the ADA has not moved. Courts are still generally looking at WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 Level AA as the practical standard, with or without a Missouri-style law backing you up.

What the Missouri law really signals is that lawmakers in at least one state now see mass-filed accessibility suits as a distinct problem from accessibility itself, and that framing tends to travel. A handful of other states have floated similar bills. Until one lands where you operate, the actual defense is unchanged: build accessibility into the templates and components your site runs on, not a widget bolted on after the fact, so there is nothing for a scan to catch in the first place.

6 things worth doing whether or not your state has a law like Missouri's

The legal landscape around these lawsuits is shifting, but the underlying fix has not changed. Here is what actually holds up.

1. Get a real audit, not just a widget: An overlay script can adjust contrast or font size, but it rarely catches a broken checkout form or a keyboard trap, which are the issues that show up in demand letters.
2. Fix the templates, not one page at a time: A labeled form field or proper heading structure fixed in the reusable component protects every page that uses it, instead of just the one that got flagged.
3. Document what you fix and when: If a law like Missouri's ever protects you, or even if a plaintiff's attorney is simply weighing whether to bother, a documented good-faith fix timeline is the strongest thing you can show.
4. Recheck after every redesign: New pages, new booking widgets, and new checkout flows are exactly where fresh accessibility gaps creep back in.
5. Take a demand letter seriously, fast: Ignoring one tends to raise both the settlement ask and the odds the case actually gets filed, according to legal sources tracking these cases.
6. Know what your own state does and does not offer: Most states have nothing like Missouri's cure period yet, so do not assume a protection exists until you confirm it applies where your business operates.

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