An open letter to local marketers
Predatory law firms use automated software to scan thousands of websites a day.
Seasoned agency or total beginner — it doesn't matter. No client list, no experience, no website of your own required. Everything you need to start is right here on this page.
Both free to start · no card · your first client pays for the rest.
The lawfare
Picture a factory.
At one end, software crawls thousands of small-business sites a day, hunting for technical violations.
At the other end, a demand letter rolls off the line. Company name swapped in. A dollar figure attached. The message: pay this, and it goes away.
Producing the next one costs almost nothing.
That's the whole machine.
A handful of law firms and repeat plaintiffs run it at scale. The economics are irresistible. Send ten thousand letters, settle even a quiet fraction, and you've made millions — without ever setting foot in a courtroom.
It was never really about accessibility, or privacy. It's a volume business.
And the deck is stacked before the first letter goes out.
Here's the number that makes it a near-guaranteed win for them.
By the most authoritative count available, 95.9% of the top one million home pages have detectable accessibility failures right now — an average of 56 per page.[4]
So when the scanner crawls your prospect's site, it will find something. Virtually guaranteed.
The owner isn't being singled out for being careless.
They're being singled out for being normal — because almost every site on the internet is technically in violation.
The "everyone else is non-compliant too" defense has a 100% failure rate.A court isn't judging everyone else. It's judging that one site owner — against established, enforceable law. "Common" has never meant "legal."
Then comes the math that makes them pay.
The letter offers a quick settlement. Fighting it in court costs far more — even when the claim is flimsy.
So the owner runs cold math and pays.
The mill isn't betting on the merits. It's betting on that math. And because it works almost every time, it's about as close to easy money as exists.
Which is exactly why the volume climbs year after year.
Across state and federal courts, thousands upon thousands of these suits flood the docket every year — tens of thousands in just the last several years, climbing toward record highs.[1][3]
And the filed lawsuits are only the visible edge.
The racket runs on the cases that never see a courtroom. For every business that gets sued, far more just get a letter and quietly pay.
Add it up, and the number of owners shaken down off the record runs into the tens of thousands — by some estimates into the hundreds of thousands — every single year.[2]
Nobody counts them. The senders don't publish, and the people who pay don't talk.[3]
The squeeze, in dollars (industry estimates)
These dollar ranges are industry estimates[2] — nobody publishes hard numbers. The 95.9% failure rate and the filed-lawsuit counts are the parts we can prove.
And accessibility is only the first front.
The second is privacy.
Since a 2022 ruling, several thousand website "wiretapping" lawsuits have been filed — the vast majority in California, and climbing fast.[5]
California law prices it at $5,000 per violation.[6] The federal video-privacy law adds $2,500 per violation for video-tracking pixels.[7]
The "wiretap"? The everyday tracking on nearly every small-business site — the Meta or TikTok pixel, Google Analytics, the live-chat box, session-replay tools.[8]
$5,000. Per script.
Now count the scripts on your prospect's homepage.California's statutory damages figure, Penal Code §637.2. Courts argue over how a "violation" is counted, but the per-violation number is the law, not a guess.
Where you come in
The mill's power comes down to a single imbalance: they can prove you're non-compliant, and you can't prove you're not.
That's the lever. Remove it, and the shakedown has nothing left to pull on.
That's your job, and it's wide open.
You walk in before the letter does. Scan the site. Fix what the bots would flag. Hand the owner court-grade, independently-verifiable proof that it's clean.
Now there's nothing to point at — and the owner has someone local in their corner.
You didn't just sell a service. You disarmed a threat before it arrived.
And step back and look at what that machine just handed you: a prospect list of every local business with a website. Your whole town.
None of them know they're exposed. None of them have anyone watching their back.
You're not chasing ambulances. You're the fire marshal who shows up before the fire.
Your two instruments
One finds the accessibility problems. One finds the privacy problems. Between them, they cover both fronts.
And both hand you an AI-ready fix list and the forensic, court-grade proof that turns a scan into a defensible record.
Service 1 · Accessibility (ADA / WCAG)
wcagcheckr.com
Scans any site for the exact accessibility problems a mill's scanner hunts for — and grades it in plain English an owner understands.
Service 2 · Privacy (CIPA / VPPA)
forensicconsent.com
Finds the trackers, pixels, chat and session-replay scripts firing before consent — the exact tech behind the privacy lawsuits.
The play, start to finish
Install both extensions (free, ~90 seconds). Pick 10 local businesses you already know and scan each — 60 seconds apiece.
"Ran a quick check on your site — found a few issues the lawsuit bots look for. Want me to walk you through it? No charge." The report does the selling.
Fix the accessibility problems. Lock down the pre-consent tracking. Two clean, concrete deliverables an owner immediately understands.
The extensions export a precise, AI-ready fix list. Paste it into your AI of choice; it writes the corrections. You review and deliver. The robot does the labor — you do the relationship.
Deliver independently-verifiable proof the site is clean. Put them on a monthly watch so it stays that way. The client never sees the robot behind the curtain.
Even if it's already happened
Most people assume that once a letter lands, the moment is gone.
The opposite is true.
A business owner who just got one is frightened, motivated, and ready to pay someone who can actually help — today.
Remember the mill's whole leverage: "you're non-compliant, and you can't prove otherwise."
So you scan, remediate, and generate forensic, timestamped, independently-verifiable proof that the issues were fixed — immediately, the day the owner learned of them.
You've flipped the script. They can now demonstrate, with court-grade evidence, that they acted in good faith the moment they were made aware.
What the proof does
Documented, immediate remediation takes much of the wind out of a "pay us or else" letter. It hands the owner a credible, evidence-backed position to negotiate from.
(Not legal advice — but ask any defense attorney what provable, same-day remediation does to a shakedown's leverage.)
Which means your client base isn't only the businesses who haven't been hit yet.
It's also every owner who already got a letter — and is searching, right now, for someone exactly like you.
The money
Start with what the big compliance vendors charge for the same outcome.
Once an owner sees that, your price looks like a rounding error.
What the big players charge
The enterprise firms won't even publish a price — it's a custom quote, and audits climb well into five figures for larger sites.[10]
What you charge (illustrative)
Illustrative — your market sets your price. The retainer is the prize: recurring, low-effort once set up, and the reason this becomes a business instead of a one-off.
And here's the kicker: the expensive "fix" most of them sell doesn't even work.
Those overlay widgets don't make a site compliant. They bolt a toolbar on top and call it done.
In 2025 the FTC fined accessiBe $1,000,000 for falsely claiming its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant.[11]
By mid-2024, more than 20% of all accessibility lawsuits were filed against businesses that already had one of these widgets installed.[12]
And 1,031 accessibility experts have signed a public statement that no overlay "can cause a website to become fully compliant… and therefore cannot eliminate legal risk."[13]
That's your whole edge in one line: you actually fix the site and hand over proof — for less than they charge for a widget that gets the business sued anyway.
20 clients on a $150/mo watch is $36,000 a year — recurring.Before a single audit or remediation fee. The math is simple on purpose: a handful of local clients and you've built something that pays every month while the tools do the watching.
The part that makes it risk-free
Both extensions are free to start — enough to scan prospects, grade them, and land your first client without spending a cent.
You bill that first client.
And their very first payment more than covers upgrading both tools to their paid tiers — the monitoring, the whole-site crawl, the forensic proof you turn around and resell.
So you bootstrap the entire operation on the client's dime.
Zero out of pocket. Zero risk. Every client after that is pure margin.
The tools pay for themselves before you've done a day of real work.
The leverage
A scanner-bot created this whole problem. Now you point an AI back at it.
The extensions don't just find the issues — they hand you a precise, AI-ready fix list for every one.
Paste it into Claude or whatever you use, and it writes the corrections, the consent config, the alt text, all of it.
You review it, deliver it, and collect.
Most of the labor is automated. All of the trust is yours.
To the client, you're the expert who found the problem nobody else caught and made it disappear. They never need to know how light the lift actually was.
Get there first
Install both, scan one business in your town today, and you'll have your first conversation by this afternoon. Free to start. Your first client funds the rest.
Free to start · no card · works in your browser
Go be the one who walked in with a flashlight.
— an insider who'd rather you got there first than another mill did
P.S. While the industry argues over whether it's 50,000 demand letters a year or 100,000, every one of them lands on a real business in a real town.
With 95.9% of sites already failing, it's not a question of if the scanner finds something — only who reaches the owner first.
You can't fix the whole machine. But you can be the person your ten favorite local businesses are relieved to have on their side.
Both tools are free. The only thing it costs to start is ninety seconds.
Figures current as of early 2026 · sources below · verify every one
Honesty policy: court-record numbers, statutory damages, and the 95.9% scan are marked [VERIFIED]. Demand-letter volume, settlement and defense-cost figures are [ESTIMATE] — because nobody actually counts demand letters. We'd rather show you the seams than pretend they aren't there.
This page describes a litigation trend and a business opportunity. It is not legal advice — including the discussion of demand letters and remediation; outcomes depend on the specific facts and on qualified counsel. Litigation counts move quickly; figures reflect the most recent data available as of early 2026.
No reason to wait
The threat is real, the prospects are your whole town, and the two extensions make the entire job drop-dead simple — the scan, the grade, the AI-written fix, the court-grade proof. Install them, scan one business today, and start the conversation by this afternoon.
Free to start · no card · your first client funds the rest.