ROUGH DRAFT

Disability Rights Bar Association

Annual Meeting

Held at:

The National Federation of the Blind

Baltimore, MD

April 1, 2016

1:40 p.m. – 5:09 p.m.

CART CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:Natalie C. Ennis, CRC, RPR / CI and CT

Certified Realtime Captioner / ASL Interpreterennis.natalie@gmail.com

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This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings

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SCOTT LaBARRE: We're going to get underway. So we encourage everybody to be come in and grab a seat. We'll get underway in a minute.

All right. Good afternoon. Welcome to the annual meeting of the Disability Rights Bar Association.

We were reflecting upon the fact that I believe this is now the fifth such meeting that we have had. So that is certainly a milestone.

It is also a milestone that the Disability Rights Bar Association was formed in April, starting in April of 2006. So this is our tenth anniversary. So happy birthday to us.

(Applause.)

We are going to talk in some depth about the history of DRBA a little bit later. So let me give you a little sketch of what we'll do this afternoon.

We'll have our first panel here in just a minute about the Willits case in Los Angeles and the multibillion dollar settlement that was reached over sidewalks in that city.

Then we will have a break, where we will have coffee and the usual refreshments. We believe in cookies here in the NFB. That's one thing we stand for. Let that be known.

After that break, we will have a panel on digital accessibility cases, and as you know, we've had some tremendous victories in the last year. We'll be discussing some of those.

After that, we will have our business meeting. At that business meeting, we will discuss the history of DRBA, and we have a surprise during that. So please don't go away during the business meeting.

We will talk about our membership criteria. We have had some questions as a board about how to determine whether certain types of individuals ought to be part of our association, and we thought it would be best to get some input from the membership. So we're going to talk about that.

Hopefully we'll have a brief financial review at the meeting, and we're going to talk about our west coast conference that's coming up in October.

And after the business meeting, it's time to party! We're going to have a reception at Little Havana's. The NFB is providing shuttles, only one-way shuttles to Little Havana’s, starting at 5:15 out in front of the Wells Street entrance. If you are parked here in our garage, you can keep your car in the garage until midnight. If you want to take your car out after midnight, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow morning.

So again, we'll have shuttles going one way to the restaurant because obviously it's hard to determine when everybody will want to come back, so please, your

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transportation out of Little Havana's is on your own. The reception will start at 5:30 and will go to 9:30.

So that's logistically what we're up to this afternoon.

Before we turn to the first panel, William Myhill, secretary on our board and the liaison with the Burton Blatt Institute, without whom we couldn't operate DRBA, so thanks to BBI, William will talk about a survey that we're issuing, a diversity survey, and it's one we want everybody to take a few minutes and help us collect information about the diversity within our field.

So William, do you want to talk about that a bit?

WILLIAM MYHILL: Thanks, Scott. I think you said everything I was going to say, which is fine. But is Jasmine here?

On behalf of the board, we had a task force on diversity that we put together, and Jasmine was key to that. They developed a survey to learn about the diversity amongst us and think about how we could further diversify DRBA.

We're going to send that out to you today. It will just come from me. We would love your input. It won't take more than ten minutes of your time. We'll pull the data together at BBI and make it available to the board for analysis, and at some point I'm sure we'll be announcing the results to DRBA. So thanks.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Thank you, William.

And we are video recording this session, the entire annual meeting, and we'll be putting that up on the website for our members once that's processed.

For the purposes of the recording, we will be releasing that survey today. It comes in the form of an email from William, and we ask everybody to take the 10 minutes or so to respond to that survey.

And just as a point of order, as we go forward in the meeting, if you have comments or questions, please find one of the microphones or let us know that you want a mic and we'll get one to you so that we have it on the recording so that everybody can hear you well.

So without further ado, let's turn to our first panel about the Willits case, a landmark victory in our field. And to moderate that panel, and one of the major workers and persons who helped impact that litigation, here is our very own vice chair of the Disability Rights Bar Association, Linda Dardarian.

(Applause.)

LINDA DARDARIAN: Thank you, Scott.

I wanted to note that this is the first of the two panels that we have today. In order to facilitate MCLE credits for the two panels, we've provide -- Kelly sent around last week

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or put on the listserv the speaker bios and the agenda for today's meeting. So you need to collect those and send those to your bar association in order to get credit. We're not a certified provider so we don't take care of that for you, but by providing these terms, you can apply for credits through your state bar association.

As Scott mentioned, this is the panel called "War and Peace: The Saga of Willits versus the City of Los Angeles, A Class Action Battle with Historical Results."

On the panel are a number of the co-counsel; who worked on the case, including myself. I'm Linda Dardarian, a partner at Goldstein Borgen Dardarian & Ho in Oakland, California. We do civil rights, disability rights, and workers' rights class actions nationally.

Each of the panelists will introduce themselves.

GUY WALLACE: I'm Guy Wallace, a partner at Schneider Wallace Cottrell Konecky Wotkyns.

PAULA PEARLMAN: I am Paula Pearlman. So previously I was the executive director and before that the director of litigation at the Disability Rights Legal Center of Los Angeles. Currently I'm assistant chief counsel at the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, and I'm here in my private capacity.

ANDREW LEE: Hi, everyone. I'm Andrew Lee. I'm a partner at Goldstein Borgen Dardarian & Ho. I work on employment matters. I have been fortunate enough to work on the Willits case at both my previous firm and current firm.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So exactly a year ago today, the Willits team here, the mayor of the City of Los Angeles, the city council, and the press held a great big celebratory press conference to announce we had reached a settlement in the Willits case, valued at approximately $1.4 billion in order to make the city's sidewalks, crosswalks, and curb ramps accessible to people with disabilities.

Today we want to talk about how we got there, how the case was involved, how it was litigated, how the city tried to derail the case by settling it with other attorneys who did not represent the class, and how we ultimately went through many other plot twists and turns in order to get to this ultimate settlement.

So Guy is going to kick it off talking about the legal theories that underlie the case. Andrew will talk about the factual scene in Los Angeles regarding its pedestrian right of way and the condition that it has been in and that will hopefully be remediated through settlement. Paula will talk about how the case gelled together.

GUY WALLACE: I'm going to start just by talking a little bit about what we had in the complaint. Two things: Program access and the fact that it is not readily accessible for persons with mobility disabilities. Second claim would be for violations of the new construction and alteration standards under Title II of the ADA.

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So just spending a little bit on those two, you want to have the program access plan because that's going to apply to all aspects of the program that you are suing, regardless of its date of construction. So here, Andrew will go into this in more depth, but the pedestrian right of ways are over 10,000 miles long. To capture all of that and to be able to get injunctive relief for all of that, you want program access because that will apply no matter when particular sidewalk segments or corners or curb ramps were constructed.

An alternative litigation strategy, though, your best claim is to do a construction claim, because here, in most cities, or public entities, what you will see is that they've done quite a bit of their new construction alterations law. That is, if they did not do it in conformance with the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines at all, or if they did make some sort of rudimentary effort to follow the design standards, they just didn't get close enough and what you come up with is a lot of stuff that's messed up.

So those, you have to figure out what the data construction is, whatever it is you're looking at, whether it's a piece of sidewalk or ramp, and compare the conditions to those in the design standards. But it's a very strong claim, and particularly with respect to street surfacing, where they're supposed to put the curb ramps in connection with the resurfacing of the streets. What you usually see is that they haven't done it at all or they've done it wrong. So that's a very strong claim.

Additional claims were maintenance, which is whether they have maintained the access features that they do have in compliance with the standards. And in L.A., many of the curb ramps have really deteriorated. Even the ones that were put in correctly in the first place, or that piece of surface at the bottom of the curb ramp when you go out into the crosswalk is cracked up with a lot of potholes, broken pavement, conditions that are inaccessible if not unsafe. So we also had a safety claim.

The other big point about the complaint I would say is that rule 23B2 class for injunctive relief is the most traditional type of civil rights class. I think we would all say it's the easiest to certify. Generally, you know, while not always true, the damages will be individualized for the class. So if you were to try to do a damages class, you're going to come up against some issues. Practically, as you'll see here, just as a practical matter in terms of settlement, where would all the money come from for damages after that anyway?

So that's how we framed the complaint.

The city's defenses against the pleadings were that the pedestrian right of way is not a program covered by Title II of the ADA. This is one that's been litigated a lot and lost in the appellate courts every time. Larry Paradis had the leading case on that, but the city, that didn't stop the city from arguing it. I don't know where they were going with that. Perhaps a cert petition, but that was one of their defenses.

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Then they claimed that they were accessible when we claimed they weren't. So I don't know what to say about that. I just find a lot of public entities are using that one.

And then they argued undue financial burden.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So, Andrew, let's fill in some of the facts.

ANDREW LEE: Sure. I'll start with the very obvious proposition that L.A. is a big city, but before we filed the case, I really didn't appreciate the full size of the city. It covers about 470 square miles. To put that into context, the cities of San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Manhattan with all fit fairly comfortably within the boundaries of Los Angeles. So the case really dealt with a very large city that had an extensive pedestrian right of way, and the access problems were equally large in scale.

Sidewalks were a huge problem. As Guy mentioned earlier, the city has about 10,750 miles of public sidewalk. The city itself estimated that approximately 4600 miles of sidewalk were in disrepair. 80% caused by tree roots. The city has about 700,000 street trees. It's one of the largest urban forests in the country. But unfortunately the city did not maintain and specifically prune the roots of these trees. So tree roots were a really big problem in causing sidewalks to uplift and buckle.

We're not talking about just small bumps in the sidewalk here. We're talking about massive cracks, 1-2-foot upheavals. I can specifically recall one picture in which someone actually climbed underneath a broken sidewalk with half her body underneath the broken sidewalk.

So the tree roots caused huge damage to the sidewalks in L.A. In 1998 the city estimated that fixing the sidewalks would cost about $500 million. Of course they didn't do anything. That estimate ballooned to 1.5 billion in 2012 due to increase in costs of labor and material.

This was a big problem for everyone. Not only did it lead to widespread inaccessibility, but the city also faced 2500 trip and fall claims each year and was paying out between $2-6 million a year on those claims.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Paula, will you talk about the selection of the plaintiffs and community outreach and use of the press?

PAULA PEARLMAN: Sure.

So this was a huge team effort. I'm really happy to be here to talk about it.

When I was at the Disability Rights Legal Center, we had a really robust outreach in education program. We had a conference called "Respectability" every other year that we did with Disability Rights California, California for Disability Rights, to bring people of a variety of disabilities together.

So it was a huge effort on our part to maintain the public presence about civil rights of people with disabilities. And that really served us well.

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Oh, my God, it's like 2006 or so, we were getting a lot of calls, a lot of -- and we had a history of doing systemic class action litigation. We had sued the courts. We had a current case also with DRA on emergency preparedness, which fortuitous for us in terms of getting the judge that we wanted.

But we were getting calls through our intake line. One of the calls, one of the callers, he had a problem. He lived up north and was having trouble crossing the street. He went to his favorite market and there were no curb cuts on that corner. He completely relied on a wheelchair.

So we thought, okay, we'll do a brief service and get him a curb cut. We're the Disability Rights Legal Center; this won't be a problem.

Guess what? It didn't work. He couldn't get a curb cut. And we were thinking, oh, my gosh, if DRLC can't get this one individual a curb cut, what's happening in the rest of the city. We already knew the sidewalks were in disrepair and L.A. has some history of not addressing anything, until they get sued. They're not long term planners.

And so we started thinking, well, we have to look at this more systemically and what are we going to do about it.

So there's a local guy, Donald Shoup, who is a professor at UCLA in the School of Public Policy, really concerned about parking in Westwood near the campus where you park on the sidewalk because there's no parking so you block the sidewalk.

He introduced us to a guy, Victor, and then through our outreach and education, we put the word out we were looking for people who have had problems with sidewalks. And it was not hard to find.

Another colleague, David, who was representing another woman, Judy Griffith, we started, you know, looking around and thinking, wow, this is a lawsuit.

We also started looking around and going, wow, this is going to be an expensive lawsuit. And this is going to be really time consuming. And we were thinking -- and at that time, I was the executive director, so I'm also thinking in the back of my mind about fundraising. So who do you co-counsel with, with private counsel who ultimately can make contributions to the firm? You get them to buy a table at the annual dinner.

And so with these multiple goals in mind, and I'm teasing, but mostly this cluster of intakes, we had had an earlier settlement in 2001 about curb cuts. And clearly the city wasn't doing anything they were supposed to do.

So we identified Schneider Wallace Cottrell Konecky Wotkyns' law firm to work with us. A guy came down, Josh, I think. And we talked about it. We decided we were going to do it.

So the other thing that you do when you run a nonprofit is you want your name out in the press. So you file press releases whenever you do anything. So we used the press

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a huge amount in litigation, until it became a problem, where this one guy called all the time, usually on the eve of a mediation meeting, saying, "Can you give me an update?"

And I was like, "No, I can't."

So that's how we started. And we lived happily ever half.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So Guy is going to talk about some of the critical moments of the early litigation.

GUY WALLACE: Yeah. Before we filed suit, we did try to work with the city to get a comprehensive resolution. The city declined. We actually had some settlement meetings in connection with a state court case that had been on file for several years called Carter Fahmie, counseled by other lawyers in Los Angeles. And those lawyers, it quickly became clear, were willing to settle for far less. And so the lightbulb went on in the heads of the city attorneys. Well, why should we talk to DRLC. We know they want a big fix. These other lawyers over in state court, they'll agree to pretty much anything.

So it was a classic reverse option situation. The city refused to talk to us anymore. We were excused, literally shown the door from the state court case settlement negotiations, and that's when we filed Willits over in federal court, because it was plain that we just weren't going to be able to get any relief otherwise.

The other ugly twist on all of that is all the state court access cases about the city and state that were put in front of one superior court judge related to each other in state. So we couldn't do any discovery. So we couldn't get any settlement traction. It was plain things were going in a not very good direction that way. We couldn't litigate.

So we filed in federal court along the lines that I described earlier.

And then, you know, we moved for class certification as quickly as we could, which actually was very, very quickly. The city opposed that, but the motion was granted.

And then right in connection with that came the city's first effort to hold up our case by using these state court proceedings. And they argued that, you know, Judge Marshall, the judge we drew, should abstain based on pretty much every single federal abstention doctrine you can think of. And if she wasn't willing to do that, she should stay our case and just let the state case run its course.

LINDA DARDARIAN: By the way, she's one of the best judges on civil rights issues in the country.

GUY WALLACE: She's great.

PAULA PEARLMAN: But we picked the worst judge. We drew the worst judge. And because we had (inaudible), we filed a notice of (inaudible) and she accepted it. So I think that really changed the face of it.

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GUY WALLACE: It was critical. No question. And then with respect to the motion to abstain, she denied it. And just in terms of the doctrinal aspect of how the complaint was framed, it was very fortunate. The state court case only had curb cuts. We had the entire pedestrian right of way. So the two cases weren't parallel and didn't fit into those doctrinal boxes where you have to abstain or stay. So she was able to deny that motion.

I think that takes us to the next part.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So Andrew will spend about five minutes talking about discovery.

ANDREW LEE: Sure. I actually forgot to mention one situation. Is it okay if I go back?

LINDA DARDARIAN: Sure.

ANDREW LEE: The city was behind in curb cuts. There are approximately 60,000 curb ramp applications. In the '90s when they assessed it, they installed about 800 curb ramps to comply with the ADA. Since then, the city has installed about 30,000, representing about 19% of all the needed ones to provide access.

And to make things worse, up until about 2007, the city was using a curb ramp design standard not compliant with the federal standards, so only about 4% of potential curb ramp locations were up to the standards.

So moving on to discovery, there was quite a bit of discovery that was conducted. The plans included eight sets of interrogatories, six sets of document requests, which led to the production of 4 million pages of documents. 20 depositions of city employees and officials, including the chief administrative officer, the ADA compliance officer, and numerous employees in the city's services. Significant expert inspections. Our expert inspected approximately 2700 curb applications and 570 sidewalk segments.

We also hired a photographer to go out and take pictures of the pedestrian right of way. The photographer took hundreds of pictures of the sidewalks.

The defendant's discovery included four sets of interrogatories and four sets of document requests, depositions of all of the plaintiffs. Combined, there were over 4.5 million pages of documents produced, over 200 interrogatories.

There were quite a few discovery disputes. Too many to talk about today. We ended up filling nine motions to compel. All of which were, at least partially, granted. Most of them were granted in full.

And one of the things we did really early on in the case was hire a special master to resolve discovery disputes. We had a really bad experience with the magistrate judge assigned to our case. We filed our first motion to compel after a lengthy process. If you're at all familiar with the motion to compel process in the central district, it is a very protracted process fraught with opportunity for delay, and the city took full advantage of that. But we were able to get a motion to compel on file, and the magistrate judge ruled

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in our favor, but told us he wanted a drafting order and asked the parties to submit competing orders and he was just going to sign off. Fortunately for us, he signed the city's proposed order and we had to object to it in district court.

At that point we decided it would be best to remove the discovery dispute process from the court, and we proposed to the city that we hire special masters. Surprisingly, the city agreed.

We ended up hiring a former federal magistrate judge. This was a real victory for us because it really sped up the discovery dispute process. It didn't burden the court. The special master ended up issuing 11 separate discovery (inaudible), all of which were generally available for us.

One of the first issues that presented itself pretty early on, was the issue of document preservation. The city was not preserving, had no document preservation policy, and city employees we were deposing routinely told us they were destroying relevant information.

So the first thing we did after we had the special master was get a preservation order in place. Unlike most cases, we (inaudible) on the form of the order so that had to be led ultimately by the special master who issued a preservation order which went out to approximately 6,000 employees.

I think this was important because we would not have obtained all of the documents if we hadn't obtained that order.

Another big issue that was ongoing throughout the case was the accuracies of the city's search for documents. It seemed like in every deposition we took, we were uncovering highly relevant and responsive documents and databases that were not produced in response to our document requests. And the city refused to confirm their searches and took the position that they produced documents only if and when they were located.

We requested that the city provide declaration detailing the search effort. Initially it was opposed but later granted. It was fairly lacking in detail. So we took the step of noticing a deposition on the city's search efforts to find documents. The city opposed that so we had to meet before the special master who agreed that the declaration was not specific enough, granted the deposition, and ended up getting into the deposition and the witness didn't have all the answers for our questions and admitted that he had not even attempted to prepare for the deposition. So we had to file another motion for the special master.

That was towards the end of litigation and was never resolved because we settled the case. It was just an ongoing discovery issue, one of, in the case.

Another big issue was the testimony in the scope of the testimony, the 30B6 depositions, which they say were too broad. Special master issued an order saying we could take the depositions, pretty much go on all the topics we were seeking, and I think

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the most important one was that the special master ruled we could seek 30B6 testimony going all the way back to the period covered by the ADA. Essentially 20 years.

LINDA DARDARIAN: It would have killed us if we had gotten all that discovery anyway. As it was, we had 4 million pages of documents.

GUY WALLACE: They didn't know how to build a coming curb ramp, but they sure knew how to stone wall. They were grand masters of it. Unbelievable.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So one of the milestones in the litigation was when we moved for partial summary judgment on the city's affirmative defenses. We always like to move for summary judgment or partial summary judgment because it not only narrows issues for trial but also shakes up the defendant and it drives the value of the settlement and the likelihood that the case will settle.

So we moved for partial summary judgment on the city's affirmative defenses that the sidewalks were not a program covered by the ADA under Title II, and we moved for partial summary judgment on the city's affirmative defense that it could claim that making sidewalks and curb ramps and crosswalks accessible would create undue financial and administrative burdens.

So as Guy mentioned, Larry and DRA were responsible for this great controlling ninth circuit decision that says that sidewalks are a program of local government under Section 504 and Title II of the ADA. Maintaining sidewalks is just something that a city normally does, so it is a program covered by the ADA and Section 504.

The city, despite that clear authority, in its stubbornness said, oh, no, there's this obscure highway code section that says that sidewalks aren't actually owned or controlled by the municipality; they're owned and controlled by the property owner adjacent to the sidewalk. So we are not responsible for the sidewalks, in other words. It's not something we do. It's the responsibility of all the property owners in the state.

So in response to that, we argued the ninth circuit authority and argued that the city did have a program for inspecting sidewalks and sending notice to property owners saying that it did actually have a maintenance program even though it wasn't using it, so that it was a city program.

And the court agreed with us. She ruled that the city's sidewalks were a program under Section 504 and Title II.

On the undue burden defense, the city had argued repairing the sidewalks and putting in the curb cuts would be undue burden. So we moved for partial summary judgment that for any sidewalks or curb ramps that were newly installed or altered or adjacent to street resurfacing since the effective dates of Section 504 and the effective date of the ADA. So June 1977 or January 1992 respectively. Anything that the city had touched or repaired or altered since then, they couldn't claim an undue burden regarding the

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inaccessibility of those facilities. That's just straight up clear statutory and regulatory construction under Title II and Section 504.

The court agreed with us. She granted partial summary judgment that there's no undue burden defense to new construction or alteration under either Section 504 or Title II.

Then we also moved for partial summary judgment that there is no undue burden defense period under Section 504 for the accessibility of existing facilities of recipients of federal financial assistance like the city. The city's Department of Public Works and Department of Engineering receive federal funding and have forever. So they were covered by section 504 as federal financial recipients.

The court agreed with us that Section 504 regulations regarding program access to existing facilities of federal financial aid recipients does not include an undue burden defense. It's not in the language of the regulation. It's not in the history of the regulation. It's simply not there.

The DOJ and Department of Health, Education, and Welfare before it, they put undue burden defenses into the regulations of other sections of Section 504 like the employment regulations and transportation regulations and education regulations, but it's not there for program access to existing facilities.

The court agreed with us. She granted partial summary judgment on that issue.

The city of course then went ballistic, had a total meltdown, and filed for certification of the issue. That issue only. They didn't bother trying to go back to the ninth circuit on whether sidewalks are a program. The ninth circuit had already answered that. But they wanted to appeal the issue of whether there is an undue burden defense for program access for existing facilities under Section 504.

The court certified that issue for interlocutor appeal because it was a controlling issue of law, and even though she didn't find that there was a significant difference of opinion about that issue, she was one of only two district courts in history as far as we know to have made that finding. The other was in another DRA case in the '90s by Claudia Wilkens, another phenomenal judge on our side. Well, she doesn't take sides. We like cases with her. She's in the northern district, and she too had held that there is no undue burden defense for program access claims under Section 504 for financial aid recipients.

So based on the novelty really of that ruling for interlocutor appeal, we were up on the ninth circuit, fully briefed, the city got an amicus brief filed on its side by the League of California Cities. And they argued that this court's holding would create catastrophic financial consequences for cities and villages and local governments all over the place, it would require cities to alter everything, which of course that's not true as long as the program is accessible, that this ruling would cause cities to default on their pension plans and they would have to eliminate their fire and police departments, and you know, all cities all over the place would collapse into insolvency.

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Never mind that people who use wheelchairs or scooters couldn't get out of their houses to get to their jobs or visit friends or engage in civic life because of the appalling condition of the sidewalks. They disregarded that and said pensions were more important and we couldn't fund everything.

The appeal was pending when the case settled. It was set for oral argument mid-April and we settled April 1st. So it did get fully briefed but did not get fully decided.

While that was going on, there was a distinct odor of mendacity arising from the state court proceedings.

GUY WALLACE: Meanwhile, back over in the Carter Fahmie case, remember that one? They had arrived at the reverse option settlement. And here's what it was. It was, they were going to do 1,000 curb ramps out of 160,000 potential locations, at a cost of 3.5 million. So that's less than 1% of the curb ramps in the entire city.

And then they were going to have a 25-year release of claims for declaratory and injunctive relief. Wait. You get more.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Or less.

GUY WALLACE: Or less. Between years 2-25, the city was obligated to spend up to $4 million per year on curb ramp installation. Depending on the availability of two different kinds of specific funds, gas taxes and another one.

So that's what the class of persons with mobility disabilities were going to get out of the injunctive relief side.

It got worse. They got these other plaintiffs' lawyers to agree that there was going to be release of all statutory and civil rights damages for the entire class for no money at all and with no opt-out right. So you had a class of about 280,000 people, all of their damages claims under federal and state law were going to be extinguished for zero dollars with no opt-out right.

So we rejected it. And we filed a lot of objections from both individuals and disability rights organizations. Pretty much all the usual suspects came rushing to our aid, which was wonderful. And there was a lengthy hearing. This doesn't end how you hope it's going to end. At least not at that stage.

Superior court judge approves the settlement as fair, reasonable, and adequate, which we thought was just outrageous.

So we appealed. And we focused the appeal on the issue around the damages release and the no opt-out right. And our pitch was, look, these damages claims are individualized, and it could very well be that the people who are interested in that sort of thing, not a part of our case, but many people are interested in the damages, might like to pursue those cases with a lawyer of their own choosing. And not these people who are willing to settle their claims for no money at all.

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And that is the argument that we got traction on with the court of appeal, which actually was otherwise quite hostile. They were fine with the 1,000 curb ramps. Their perspective on that was, hey, people are getting at least something, counsel.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Mind you, this was less than the city was already doing.

GUY WALLACE: Yeah, it was horrible. You would think they would also be critical of that part of the settlement, but they weren't.

What I took away from that was, you know, as a general rule, there is a real sort of sympathy on the part of state court judges of these municipal and state entities.

But the other piece of the settlement, the no damages plus the damages release with no opt out, they just couldn't stomach it. It was that the city had overreached. And so they said the settlement class had to be decertified as being inconsistent with Wal-Mart versus Dukes and also a violation of due process. In individual damages claims, people have to have the opportunity to opt out.

So because settlement class had to be decertified, the settlement disappeared. It was vacated. And we thought we -- we are now, by the way, in the beginning of about April 2014. When we filed the Willits complaint, it was August of 2010. When we were trying to work things out with them, it was 2009. To give people a sense of how time is passing here.

We thought, great, we've gotten rid of Carter Fahmie, we've won, but there's another twist. The city, very persistent people, the lawyers for the city call up the Carter Fahmie guys. At this point we don't know what's going on. And they say, hey, you know what, what if we just come up with the same settlement and this time we'll include the opt out. And we'll put that back in front of the superior court judge and get that blessed and then we'll go back over on the Willits side and we'll make another motion for preclusion, at least on the curb ramp issue, and then we'll ask about the remainder of the case about sidewalks be stayed.

The only way we found out about this was Mark Johnson had looked at the electronic docket for the Carter Fahmie case and saw a hearing had taken place. He ordered the transcript, and there's this ugly exchange with the superior court judge, where he says to them, "Where are the Willits people? I know they're interested in this."

"Well, your Honor, we didn't think that they would need to know about this. After all, they're not parties here. And don't worry about them. We'll give them notice after you grant preliminary approval of our new settlement. It's new and improved, it has an opt-out right, and you know, we can just get this all wrapped up at long last." Judge Wiley described it as "The wheelchair case. Get this wrapped up and it will be over with." And he was willing to go along with that. But unfortunately, we had found out about this through looking at the docket and the transcript. And we went to the city and said, "We want you to stop doing that." And they said no.

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LINDA DARDARIAN: So, actually, this was two years ago during the tenBroek conference. So Paula and I were here and we all had a big conference call with the city in the kitchen, screaming at them about, "How do you think you can get away with this!"

They said, "We're not up to anything wrong. We're free to negotiate with those other people your federal claims in the state court case."

We said, "Well, we can't allow this to go on. We're going to have to go to the judge, to Judge Marshall in federal court."

The city's plan was to preclude the federal claims for curb ramp access, and then they were going to argue that the city council was already coming up with a plan to fix the sidewalks so that our case would be completely precluded by those two actions.

As Guy has mentioned, it's really hard to get a settlement overturned or rejected at preliminary approval. It's much easier to prevent a bad settlement from happening in the first place.

So we moved the court, our judge, to enter an order prohibiting the city from engaging in negotiations of the federal claims for sidewalk access and curb ramp access with anyone other than us, the class counsel, whom she had appointed to represent the class on those claims.

And we argued that this order was appropriate under both rule 23D of the federal rules of civil procedure because the court has the power, she has a lot of discretion and power to effectively manage the case in front of her, and the case in front of her had to do with federal claims that they were trying to preclude in the state court case.

Also that under the class action rules, she could control the ethical conduct of the parts before her so that she could use rule 23 to prevent the city from engaging in unethical communications with the class outside of the presence of their lawyers.

And then we also ordered that by trying to preclude the case that was before the court, the city's actions were threatening her jurisdiction over the claims and the class that she had jurisdiction over because the case was a certified class action. And that that would be an order that she had the power to issue under the All Writs Act of 1789. I don't know if any of you remember that, but it doesn't really come up that often in normal life outside of law school. It is coming up increasingly frequently in class action mitigation, where there is more than one case filed on a particular issue and the defendant picks a set of plaintiff's counsel they want to deal with because they think they can get a cheaper deal with them and by entering into a binding settlement agreement with the less qualified or less skilled lawyers, it will preclude the case, the stronger case, from going forward.

So but there is a limitation on the court, federal court's, power to issue orders to protect under that act and that's a separation of powers doctrine that came out also in the 1700s, saying that a federal court cannot bar proceedings in a state court unless those

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proceedings threaten the federal court's jurisdiction over a case that's pending in front of it.

So we argued that the order we sought to prohibit the city from negotiating with the state court lawyers our federal claims, that that was authorized under the All Writs Act, necessary to protect the court's jurisdiction and it wasn't actually prohibiting proceedings from going on in the state court, we just wanted the court to protect the claims that were in the federal court. Federal claims were not actually being litigated in the state court by the state court lawyers.

But the judge didn't give us exactly the order we asked for. She actually gave us something that was fine and it protected her from being reversed on appeal. Again, we had asked for her to prohibit them from negotiating with anybody except us. The city from negotiating with anybody except us.

Her order said that the city could negotiate the federal claims with the Carter Fahmie lawyers so long as we were included in the negotiations so that we could protect the class' interest and protect the federal claims that were before the court. So it had to be, the negotiations had to at least include us. That was her order.

And while that was not what we wanted, it really was enough. It got the job done. Because the city's goal was to push us out and to negotiate directly with the other lawyers because they knew they could get a lousy settlement from them and they knew from way back when, before Willits was even filled, that we would not tolerate that, that we wanted a real settlement that provided real systemic relief. So the fact that we had to be involved in negotiations about the federal claims, even if the other lawyers were involved, that put an end to it. It was a huge victory.

Of course it's an injunction, so the city appealed that too. And that appeal was pending before the ninth circuit when we settled the case.

But that order really allowed us to start making some real progress in negotiations. Guy will talk about the settlement process.

GUY WALLACE: The settlement process was a protracted one. I think we had our first big mediation in about August of 2013. This was with two mediators. We had a judge that the city selected. On our side, we picked our own judge, who was excellent.

So we had a couple of big mediations, and we also had a number of these so-called small group meetings directly with the other side.

One good thing that came out of the mediation process is the city administrative officer, who I had deposed, started coming to the settlement meetings, and he actually was one of the officials who runs the city of L.A. on a daily basis and has direct access to all the decision makers and knows how much money the city actually has. Which is a lot more than you think. What they tell you is they have absolutely no money. I'm sure you guys

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have all heard this. Oh, we have no money. We would love to do this but we don't have the money.

But the reality is, when it comes to construction, they have all sorts of ways of using financial instruments, bonds, various other means of raising funds that they can use to do construction. I had deposed him about all of this stuff, so we also used a forensic accountant to sort through the city's comprehensive annual financial report, which will identify for you the different kinds of funding instruments they have and can use. They're available for margin of borrowing -- 60 billion they still had available that they could use for financing construction and the like.

So we had Miguel Santana involved in the settlement negotiations, and also Jim Clark, who is the deputy city attorney, who turned out to be an interesting piece of work in the end. But certainly in the initial stages, he was very helpful because he was now it, but he was very senior. He also had access to the elected decision makers.

And so as of about when we had these ugly interactions with them about the secret efforts they had to go to the other lawyers directly, we started to pick up speed in terms of the amount of money that was on the table. We had started off with him saying, "Well, we've got about 250 million we can commit to this." And then after a session with the mediators, that went up to about 4 or 500 million.

By the time we finally had beaten back the state court settlement and gotten the order from Judge Marshall preventing the entering into these collusive negotiations, we had worked them up to a billion.

So you know, we really had done our homework, so to speak, on the issue of what it would take to get a systemic fix. We knew from the city's own analyses that it was about 1.5 billion, and we needed as much of that as we could possibly get.

We also knew that the city had the ability to, you know, use bonds and other similar instruments to fund that construction. And so we slowly and persistently worked them up to this billion dollar range.

And then once we got that on the table, that was the -- I suppose there were many hard issues, but that was the toughest. That was it, getting enough financial commitment from them to fix the process, or fix the, excuse me, the right of way.

And after that, the settlement process started to go more smoothly on the secondary issues like what would an access request program look like that was meaningful. Because it's one thing, you know, to do all that work. I mean, 30-year settlement is not really very desirable, right? That's an awful long time to bring something into compliance.

But the reality is, how are they going to do all that construction? That's an awful lot of work. This is a major public works program. So you need a lot of years to do 10,000 miles.

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But then spending $30 million or more a year in all the practical planning and real world construction by workers out in the sidewalks and corners and intersections throughout the city, 470 square miles, which is like a city state, right? Not like a city but its own state. So as a practical matter, they're going to need a lot of time to do all that.

So are the class members going to have to wait until the end of this 30 years to get what they really need? That's a long time.

So the access request program was the major secondary issue for settlement discussions that we had to deal with. I'll let other people talk about how we worked on that. There was one meeting after another after another. It was exhausting. The whole case was exhausting.

LINDA DARDARIAN: So we started out with the two mediators, but what we realized was that two mediators weren't better than one. They weren't even better than none. So we ended up, it was really Miguel Santana's idea to not let his outside counsel come. So it was really critical to furthering the settlement process and getting to a deal that the city of Los Angeles pushed their own lawyers out of the room. Now that we were in the room, they had to leave, their own lawyers.

So the groups were Guy, Paula, myself, Santana, Jim Clark, and occasionally someone from the Bureau of Street Services. And that's really how we got the deal done, was without the interference of the mediators and the outside counsel.

PAULA PEARLMAN: Can I add something? So I think the turning point of the case, there were two. One was, I think Guy minimizes the deposition. The effect of the deposition of Miguel Santana and hiring the forensic accountant who understood every single money stream. Because I think he had no idea what was coming. Because Guy would say, "What about this funding stream?"

"Oh, yeah, we can use that."

"What about this one?"

"Oh, yeah, we can use that."

"What about this one?"

And after that, I think he really felt decimated. That he was like, oh, my goodness, what are we doing here.

And then there was an election and we got rid of this bizarre city attorney and we actually got a person who is a fairly public minded person who used to run a very major nonprofit in Los Angeles. And he brought in Jim Clark.

But those two things. I think Santana's deposition was the turning point.

LINDA DARDARIAN: He even told us that. He said, "Once you took my deposition, I really started paying attention to this. This is a problem and we need to fix it."

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And the new mayor, what he had been campaigning on was the issue of how lousy the sidewalks were in Los Angeles.

So we have another 15 minutes. We want to leave some time for questions. So I think what we'll do now is just sort of take off the terms of the settlement agreement. We've included the settlement agreement in the materials that were circulated online. But as Guy said, it's a 30-year term of the agreement. New construction and alterations, the city will be paving all over the place. So it will be doing a lot of alterations work to fix the failed roadways over the next 30 years. That money does not come out of the program access fund. So that's being paid for separately. So programs that are installed, curb ramps, as a result of street resurfacing, is paid for separately. To fix the existing sidewalks and curb ramps apart from new construction is $1.37 billion for that.

The benchmark for the fund was that the city could appropriate $31 million a year toward these fixes. It was Paula's genius idea to add an inflation factor. So we have, based on the two prior 30-year cycles of interest rates in the United States, we took the average and we applied that to the program access fund so that the $31 million today, which will be $67 million in 26 years, that's how much the city has to spend, as a minimum, on fixing existing sidewalks and curb ramps.

We have a prioritization of fixes based on the Title II priorities. The access request program will be available for all residents to request sidewalk and curb ramp fixes. The city has to use best efforts to respond and fix each request within 120 days. The city is hiring an ADA coordinator for the pedestrian right of way. There will be thorough reporting and monitoring and meetings with us on a regular basis.

The class release is for injunctive relief only, not for damages. If people want to sue the city, they're free to. And we are going to have reimbursement of our attorneys' fees and costs.

All of this litigation was extremely expensive. And we had to expend a lot of out of pocket money as well, including hiring the special master for the discovery disputes. We had to pay him $600 an hour. You get a magistrate for free, but that magistrate was unfair. We decided to go with a special master that cost us $600 an hour.

So altogether our lodestar, the amount of the value of time we spent, was about $13.3 million and out of pocket costs were $1.7 million. That's one of the many reasons we have so many co-counsel.

And I wanted to mention as well, another co-counsel firm was the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center. They've about working on this case with us as well. Judy Kim should have been on the panel with us but she had other plans.

GUY WALLACE: Jose Allen also helped us with the Carter Fahmie appeal, which was helpful as well.

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Government entity defendants are usually pretty tough, but I think some of them are worse than others. This one was a really bad one. Horrible. And it's a problem that they had given up on. The mayor formerly was a friend of Santana's and said to him, "Why are you working on this with them? You know the sidewalks can't be fixed. You know this is not a solvable problem. Why are you putting your time into this?" This is what Santana told me.

Fortunately, with the shift to the new mayor, the mayor became supportive of trying to get this done. But this was an extremely difficult environment with an enormous problem.

So the point there is, know what you're getting into. If you know it's this kind of case, make sure you have a very tight bench. It's not just the amount of money that you have to fund. It's sustaining the emotional commitment over that number of years with all of the abuse really that went on. The stone walling in discovery. I mean, these guys knew how to work it. They were really difficult. And so you're going to need a lot of talented lawyers because otherwise the whole thing just falls apart.

PAULA PEARLMAN: This was -- I live in L.A. So you think everybody drives in L.A. But a lot of us walk. And it's a huge, huge problem. I can't tell you how often people talk about sidewalks in Los Angeles. You know the SNL which freeway do you take? People have their favorite terrible sidewalk stories.

I actually tripped about a month ago on my way to an ex parte writ hearing. I totally fell and injured my knees, bleeding, and I'm just like, I can't believe these vertical obstructions, and I just went flying across the sidewalk. So it happens.

I think it was Santana's legacy. His mom fell at one point during the negotiations, and I think it was like, "Oh, my goodness. This is a real problem." So it hit home for him.

For me, I started doing disability rights law by editing the amicus brief in Barden. So addressing the sidewalks in one of the last earth metropolitan areas in the country with a huge amount of resources. I can't wait. Like they're really going to fix it.

ANDREW LEE: I think the biggest take away for me was don't file these cases in state court.

(Laughter.)

PAULA PEARLMAN: That wasn't on purpose. We never do anything in state court.

LINDA DARDARIAN: It's true, because state court judges do not know the Americans with Disabilities Act. They have no idea. And they devalue ADA claims.

PAULA PEARLMAN: In fact, the state court judge at one of the hearings said, "You'll make all of the trees fall over."

(Laughter.)

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I mean, we have a beautiful natural area, but seriously? People can't get out of their house, and you're worried about the trees falling over?

LINDA DARDARIAN: For me, the takeaway is you always want to maintain a line of communication with the defendant because ultimately the case will likely settle. But at the same time, you have a recalcitrant, nasty defendant or vexatious defendant like the City of Los Angeles, you have to fight hard. You can't trust them necessarily. I mean, this defendant in particular showed that we couldn't trust them. So we had to keep litigating the case hard, even while we were in settlement negotiations.

So depending on the character of the defendant, you know, they always ask when you're entering into settlement to stay litigation. I recommend against it. You have to keep the litigation pressure on. Once you've started, you've got to keep going.

So I think that's it for us. We will take questions.

>> So I'm going to congratulate you guys. It's amazing.

(Applause.)

You put together a tremendous team. All I'm saying is for all the same reasons you just said about settlement, this is a long term fix. And so I would expect that they're going to be just as bad for the next 30 years.

And so I think one of the things that we've learned, I just got a file on a case from 1989, is that you have to have a team that's ongoing. Hopefully you get access to information. My experience is, it's a natural feeling, that the defendants too just sort of let down, settle the case, now they'll go away, and you also have public enemy. Administrations change, attitudes change. So it's just a long slog. You're right where you want to be and you have a great judge, which is good. But keep your eyes attentive.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Thank you, Michael.

GUY WALLACE: Yeah, we need to have monitoring fees built in to the settlement.

And you know, Michael brings up a very good point. I think you might be referring to the prison litigation, that they've been working for a very long time on prison law.

But I know from Lopez versus San Francisco Unified School District, we also got a good result. First thing that happened in that consent decree was the defendant didn't do it. There was a group of schools that they were supposed to be first up and we actually had to make a motion to (inaudible).

So I'm expecting with these guys that there will be some trouble.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Thankfully we have Andrew and Paula, who are younger than Guy and I. They'll be around in 30 years to keep fighting the city.

GUY WALLACE: It needs to be a multigenerational effort.

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(Laughter.)

Wow.

>> One issue brought up that the sidewalk isn't a program access and it's common for cities to devolve responsibility on to adjacent land owners and that of course does not absolve the city. Did you include anything about restructuring that, cajoling the city into actually enforcing any changes to the complaint process, the citation process to make that easier for the city? It's in their interest to get the land owners to actually do stuff.

PAULA PEARLMAN: So there's two ways. One is the city is going to fix certain things and they're going to certify the sidewalks, and then after that, I believe it's mostly in the residential areas. And for the businesses, there's a two-year program to give you time and then you have to fix it.

And they were trying to put together their teams of certified people who can do it and do it right. I think part of it in a discussion earlier this morning about getting the operations people to the table. So sometimes in order to make it really work, you have to work within your system so that when we go away, it's still in place.

GUY WALLACE: The settlement instrument is set up to keep the duty on the city. So if they're not spending the money each year in making the fixes, we can enforce directly against them. And then what happens between them and these third parties, that's up to them.

LINDA DARDARIAN: But they are instituting a program where once they've fixed a sidewalk, if it falls into disrepair again, they can have the property owner be responsible for it.

PAULA PEARLMAN: The city of L.A. invoked an ordinance that said the sidewalk is the responsibility of the land owner, and they say, oh, we'll take it on. When money was flush, they used to fix the sidewalks. Then as money became tight, they still had this ordinance but they were still not enforcing it. So it really fell to pieces is what happened. So they're repealing that ordinance.

>> Two quick questions. I'm curious to know, the one with the no opt out and no damages, did it also say no attorneys' fees?

And second of all, I'm still not sure I understand entirely not why the city settled, when they had no fewer than two interlocutor appeals pending?

GUY WALLACE: The state court case settlement, I think the first time they started that approval process was in 2011 so that was actually chronologically before the interlocutor appeals.

And then on the issue of attorneys' fees, there were the plaintiff's counsel in that, they didn't do any depositions or any discovery whatsoever. They did only informal

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discovery. But they sought $2 million in fees, including 3.0 multiplier from the superior court judge.

We objected to that saying it conferred no benefit on the class whatsoever; in fact, it hurt the class. And they came out of that with an award I think of 700 grand or so, for doing nothing except going to CMCs. There was also no motion practice in that case. So CMs, no discovery, and they just would meet with the city and come up with this stuff. So it was very ugly.

>> As a follow-up, I was curious about what happened with the state court case. It sounds like there was a settlement. Is the case still active?

GUY WALLACE: Yes. What is happening with the state court case is the city wanted to release those people also. They actually do have a settlement that now exists. It's our settlement. They have changed out what is in there and that will go through the superior court and those people, I think they're getting similar fees.

LINDA DARDARIAN: They're losing the appeal.

GUY WALLACE: They're going to get some more fees. And I'm not going to say a name, but I will note that the lead lawyer on all of that is going to be president of the consumer attorneys in California in just a few years.

LINDA DARDARIAN: Oh, and the defense lawyer who represented the city in the state court case is someone we see a lot and you're familiar with him. David Raizman.

PAULA PEARLMAN: Former director of Disability Rights.

GUY WALLACE: He's a real bastard.

(Laughter.)

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Just a side note. As I was listening to this, with each unusual term, I was thinking, how would I deal with that. And then what you guys came up with as the way to deal with it was better than anything I was coming up with in my head. And with sophistication and the persistence and the imagination and the sheer talent you brought to this, I'm just in awe. I'm so glad you took this case. It will be such a model for the rest of us. Thank you.

(Applause.)

LINDA DARDARIAN: I have to say, it really was teamwork. We had a great team. We kept each other inspired. We challenged each other. Any good idea, any great result that came out of this, it was a real team effort. So it was a blessing and a privilege to work on this case. And will be for the next 30 years.

(Laughter.)

SCOTT LaBARRE: We look forward to hearing about this at the 2046 DRBA annual meeting. We'll see how it was resolved. I'll be 77 at the time and I look forward to it.

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We'll stand in recess for about -- well, let's get back here as soon as we can as close as we can to 3:15 to keep on time.

(Break.)

SCOTT LaBARRE: All right. Our second panel is to discuss accessibility in the digital world. And obviously this is one of the larger barriers that we face. As the world grows increasingly more reliant on digital information in every sphere of life, we have to find a way to secure a foothold and to find a way to make sure that that new world, those new frontiers, are available to people with disabilities.

It is personally so frustrating when technology holds the promise of making something accessible yet because of the design, and often the deliberate design not to incorporate certain features, that technology is just as unusable to someone like me as a piece of paper with print on it. And people in my situation are just as shut out from that world as any other. It is so liberating when technology is accessible. I reflected upon this in the morning. I needed to get some cash. And right over here in our lunch room, we have a fully accessible ATM. It is so liberating to be able to just go through that process independently, get what I need and go on my way.

Without the work of many lawyers who are members of DRBA and are in this very room, and without the work of many organizations like mine, the National Federation of the Blind, that wouldn't be possible because people just don't think about it.

So this panel is to discuss some of the tremendous victors that we have had in just this last year. And based on what has occurred in just this last year, I think the trend is extremely encouraging, and we're really starting to make that foothold and have it stick. But obviously now is not the time to stop, because a lot of barriers and challenges still remain.

So we have a great panel. We have Tim Fox, Joe Espo, and Lainey Feingold. And in your materials are their extensive bios. But let me just say something quickly about all three.

Tim Fox is the cofounder and co-executive director of CREEC, the civil rights enforcement and education center. And it's in my home city of Denver. And CREEC was started, I think it's coming up on a couple of years now, and basically this is Tim and Amy's efforts. They started CREEC out of their law practice, Fox and Robertson, which for many, many years litigated important 503, ADA cases, and other disability rights cases. And they're basically in my view continuing the tremendous work that they did at Fox and Robertson, however, just doing it at CREEC and therefore they're able to expand into other areas and engage some other programs. For a long time before that, Tim had worked for some large firms both in Denver and D.C. He's a graduate of Stanford law school. So in a minute, we'll hear from Tim.

Then we have Joe Espo, a partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, who is primarily in the past has done a variety of personal injury cases, particularly involving lead paint in

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housing projects and so forth and gaining tremendous victors for clients in that arena. And he's also expanded in the area of disability rights. He's done tremendous work in the area of getting captioning secured at public venues such as FedEx Field, for deaf clients. He's handled a number of cases in that arena. He's also worked on cases for the National Federation of the Blind largely in the area of employment law, and that's where his main focus today will be on a case. I also learned from his bio that he was a reporter before being a lawyer and worked in Flint, Michigan. So I wonder if he wrote any water articles back in those days. We'll have to ask him.

And finally, Lainey Feingold, who has her own law practice and has been doing that since at least 1996. She essentially invented what we now call structured negotiations, and has done a tremendous job. She has secured over 60 major national settlement was very large corporations, CVS, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, the list is long. And she's going to talk about some significant structured negotiations and victories she has achieved in the last year and talk about other issues that she's working on.

Without further ado, we'll go to our first panelist, Tim Fox.

(Applause.)

TIM FOX: Thank you so much. So I'm going to be talking about the lawsuit that we are working with the National Association of the Deaf, DREDF, and the Massachusetts Disability Law Center in a case against Harvard and MIT for failure to provide captioning for people who are deaf.

I knew going into this that of course the internet is becoming a big part of our lives and that would be true of education as well, but I really had no idea how broad that has become. If you go, for example, and start looking around for Harvard materials on the internet, you'll find that of course on their own website, Harvard.edu, they have courses, precourses, they have lectures, and all sorts of other material, but that's not the only place. They also have a YouTube channel. Each of their colleges has a YouTube channel as well. The law school, business school, etc. And there are literally thousands and thousands of videos there. And that's not all as well. They provide videos from Harvard and MIT to MOOCs, which is Massive Open Online Courses such as EDU or Udacity. And other digital content is found on things like sound cloud and iTunes. So it's very broad, very pervasive. And much of it is inaccessible to deaf persons because either they have no captioning whatsoever or they use the YouTube automatic captioning that is very inaccurate. Have you ever tried to follow along on it? About once every ten words or so, and it's usually the very important words, you have no idea what they're saying.

So one of the things I want to stress about the internet, because as I'll talk to you a little bit about this case, which is an ongoing case, is how important immediacy is to the internet. And when you think about how you use the internet, one of the things that I think is key and it comes up for example in west law but also just kind of when you're messing around with the internet trying to find different things is being able to switch

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back and forth without having to, you know, wait like you would for example in a library to get a new book or anything like that. If you see a video or an interesting lecture and it leads up to something else, you can immediately click on that and have access to it.

So that's as important to deaf persons as anybody else, and that's going to be important to some of the arguments that the university has made.

Okay. So we started investigating this and we sent a demand letter to MIT and Harvard back in late 2013. They then retained their first law firm in this case. Those negotiations were confidential, but suffice to say they didn't go anywhere. So we filed suit in 2015 in the western district of Massachusetts. At that point they switched to their new law firm, Jones Day. Jones Day, we brought a lawsuit both under the Rehab Act and ADA. We filed it both as an organizational plaintiff with the NAD along with several named plaintiffs and we brought it as a class action.

I'll get to the -- I want to tell you now a little bit about the legal background. A lot of this will be familiar to you.

We brought suit under Title III of the ADA, apples to places of public accommodation, and under the Rehab Act, federal recipients of financial aid.

One of the key things in these kinds of cases concerns the regulations concerning websites. The Department of Justice is responsible for issuing regulations pursuant to Title III, and in 2010 the DOJ gave advanced notice of their intent to issue regulations specific to websites.

When they did that, they made clear at the time that the DOJ viewed websites as already having been covered by the ADA but they felt like they needed to provide specific requirements because websites simply weren't being made accessible.

That was in 2010.

Since that time they have repeatedly indicated that they are going to be issuing website regulations, but they have not done so.

The last we heard, they do these semiannual regulatory agendas, each agency, and the DOJ has said that they anticipate that Title II regulations concerning websites and Title II apples to state and local governments, in the beginning of 2016, which has not yet happened, and that they would be doing website regulations on Title III in 2018, and that hasn't happened obviously. That is a best case scenario. It's very unlikely that that date will be met either.

So right now we're operating under more generic regulations, both under the Department of Justice for Title III entities. The primary one applicable to websites is the effective communication requirement, which says that covered entities must provide communication that's effective for all persons with different kinds of disabilities and gives as an example of an auxiliary aid to provide effective communication, captioning.

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The Department of Education also has done regulations, and the way the Rehab Act works is that the funding agency providing funding to the entity is the one whose regulations matter. The Department of Education has issued regulations, again, not websites specific, and, in fact, what's odd about the DOE regulations is their auxiliary aid regulation is only within the subsection of regulations applicable to students. They have more generic regulations that say things like, you cannot provide an unequal benefit or deny a benefit based on disability that applies to all of their relationships but their auxiliary aid regulation only apples, at least based on the text, to their relationship with students. All of this becomes relevant in a moment when we talk about what the universities did after they got sued.

Okay. So after we filed, both universities filed motions to dismiss and made a number of arguments that I think are fairly common these days when it comes to website accessibility. Although one was a little bit unique. The one that they primarily relied on is based on their characterization of the relief that we are seeking in this case, and what they call it is that we are asking that they either caption or remove all videos on their various websites or videos that they provide to other websites. And based on that, they are arguing that our relief is not attainable because it would result in the fundamental alteration to how they do things.

Fundamental alteration is a defense and it's clearly a defense and it's a defense on which the defendant bears the burden of proof. So it's kind of odd for a defendant who has the burden of proof to move to dismiss in a situation that would seem to be clearly factual and not be able to be based on just the allegations of the complaint, which is now motions to dismiss are judged.

In order to make this argument, they went back to a couple of Supreme Court cases. The Davis decision and the Chote decision, establishing the difference between requests under the Rehab Act that would provide for meaningful access to benefits, which is permissible and requests under the Rehab Act that would result in an alteration to whatever benefit or program is being sought.

The way that Harvard and MIT have characterized what we are requesting is that they're saying, no, you're not asking for meaningful access to our videos. We're asking to you fundamentally alter the videos that we provide. Which is I guess I can't say BS on tape but it is BS. So one of the things that has been very clear by all of the reports that have considered things like auxiliary aids is that those fall within the framework of meaningful access. So if you look at the case in the D.C. circuit which looked at the accessibility of currency to persons who are blind, the court there made it very clear and distinguished cases like Chote that said this is a prototype of the kind of request for meaningful access, in that case to currency, through the use of auxiliary aids. That's what we argue in front of the magistrate judge, that this was just a standard kind of meaningful access auxiliary aid case.

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And the court agreed. They said, yes, it's larger in scope, this is a big case, but it's exactly the same kind of request that you see all the time when you're looking for meaningful access. And in this case, we're seeking captioning.

So the magistrate judge ruled in our favor on that in very, very good language.

One other -- I don't want to go too long here but a couple of other arguments they made. One was the inventory exception. There's a provision under Title III in 28C, and it often is something that comes up in these kinds of cases. It came up for example in the movie theater captioning cases. It provides that this does not require public accommodation to alter its inventory to include accessible for special needs. The defendants like to call captioning as requiring a special good.

But it's not. What we're asking for through captioning is simply access to the goods that are being made available to the services that are being made available to everyone else.

And so really, a couple of keywords here that the court focused on is that this is really involving inventory and goods. Not services. And so the court agreed with us, and this is following in step with other decisions like from the ninth circuit, the Harkins decision, all of which said to the extent the inventory decision applies, it does not apply to movies or captioning of videos which are not goods but are more services.

Another thing I wanted to mention, it really turns the ADA and Rehab Act on its head. The universities have argued that the provisions of the ADA and Rehab Act that require an individualized analysis of each person's situation to determine the appropriate accommodation should apply in the situation involving captioning of videos. So instead of actually just providing captioning, which is the obvious auxiliary aid necessary here, they say that each person who is deaf needs to contact the universities and then allow them to engage in individualized determination of what it is that they should do to provide them access, which is just a silly argument. This is where I would use BS again.

So we pointed out that that's not how the system works and that this would simply be inconsistent with all of the various cases in which classes have been certified, like Paulson, like Harkins, where the auxiliary aid is obvious, and in fact there's a line of cases in the tenth circuit called Robertson versus Los Alamos County, where you may need to request as a person with a disability a particular accommodation or auxiliary aid, but when the need is obvious, then that requirement doesn't apply. So the magistrate judge agreed with us on that as well. And in fact completely denned their motion to dismiss in a very well thought out 45-page decision.

And so now they have fired that firm and brought in another firm. So we have Goodwin Proctor as their most recent firm, appealing the magistrate judge's decision to the Article III judge. So that's where that stands and we are about to submit our briefs to the

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Article III judge a week from today and we're confident that he is going to uphold that decision.

I think that's my 15 minutes. Are we doing questions?

SCOTT LaBARRE: We'll hold questions for the end. Thank you very much, Tim.

(Applause.)

And here mostly to talk about the Reyazuddin case is Joe Espo.

JOE ESPO: Scott, in a phone call, talking about what it is he wanted us to discuss, said he wanted me to talk about the Reyazuddin case. It was a big win and I'll talk about that.

But then he said, what I really want you to talk about, and then he identified an area in which we lost. So I'll do some of that too because that in the long run is winning that issue that we did not get to present to the jury in the long run may be the more significant of the items.

Just brief background, Ms. Reyazuddin is now a 52-year-old employee of Montgomery County. She's worked since the early 1990s. She's worked for ten years in a departmental call center where she took phone calls along with four colleagues, answered questions, provided information to folks calling in and the county was perfectly satisfied with her work.

In 2008 she and her colleagues were told that this is Montgomery County, Maryland, was going to buy new software and consolidate all of the departmental call centers into a single unified call center.

She at least eight times between then and when the software was purchased, said to her supervisor, you've got to make sure, I'm worried, you have to make sure you're going to do something about accessibility when you buy this software. So there was no question about the employer being on notice.

It of course didn't do anything about accessibility when it bought the software. And then, in fact, the issue never got any attention until about a month before she and her colleagues were supposed to move to the new call center. That's when they sort of first discovered it was inaccessible, and largely I would add inaccessible because of the decisions they made when they were installing it.

For roughly -- so she never went to the call center. She has been maintained on the county payroll but has been mostly unproductive since 2009. We filed suit on her behalf under the Rehabilitation Act, and for two reasons. One was a conscious -- we were concerned about the timing of the filling of the charge of the EEOC, but in addition to that, we consciously want to get away from the straightjacket that sort of Title I seems to provide that says reasonable accommodations are okay. That's good. But the concern was the reasonable accommodation by Montgomery County would be simply creating a

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disability-free work zone in a call center and she would be placed somewhere else and as the use of technology expanded, the number of jobs available for blind county employees would shrink.

To sort of get to where we are now, to quickly move this along, we lost on summary judgment in the trial court in 2014. We then got that reversed in the fourth circuit in 2015. And it was tried in February of this year.

The jury found every question in favor of the plaintiff on liability. That is, found that she was otherwise qualified to do the job in the call center, found that she was not accommodated either in the call center or in her sort of no work position in various other offices in the county, and found that her proposed accommodation, a fix of the technology, was not an undue hardship. Our expert estimated that the fix would cost between $129-190,000. The county said that was too much. Their own expert said that the fix would cost I think the top number was about two and a quarter. This is a county with an annual budget of $3.7 billion. So it's my position that it wasn't an undue hardship either way.

Amazingly enough, we then learned that the -- I guess I should say that there was another position in the call center open while the case was going on. She even applied for that and was turned down. We amended the complaint under Title II of the ADA which then was a claim in the fourth circuit.

The fourth circuit held in the appeal that Title II doesn't cover employment. So we took a loss there.

One of the -- so we tried the case, we won on liability, we got no money in damages, and one of the things I have been thinking about and was hopping maybe others would have some ideas, is how do we persuade juries who are hearing about employees who are still working full time and getting paid that they are still suffering a compensable harm because they're being paid to do nothing or they're in a job that provides no upward mobility or any sort of job satisfactions that many of us take for granted.

Included in the materials, we thought we won so we thought the next step would be asking for injunctive relief to get the system fixed. It turns out the next step was to be filling a brief on why we were entitled to ask for the relief, which has been included in the materials that were sent out.

The county's position, they haven't filed their response, but in a telephone conference, their position was, well the jury didn't give you any money so there must be nothing wrong so we should just all go home now.

So the other thing we learned recently is that the county is doing it again. The software is sold by Oracle. The county is installing the newest version of the software in the newer versions of the internet web browser from Microsoft. And the stuff comes accessible. But Montgomery County is doing something, we haven't figured out what because we don't have any discovery on it, so that it will not be accessible when they

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turn it in in its call center. Seems to me the likely sort of plan for them would be to put it in, turn it on, and say now the case is moot, judge. But they say, it's not accessible, they can't make it accessible, and it will cost even more money than it would in 2009 to fix that. And it just really is sort of beyond my imagination what, if anything, those folks are thinking.

The argument that we made, both in the trial court and in the fourth circuit that we lost on, is that the county had an obligation to purchase accessible software. That is, even if it had no blind employees in its workforce at the time they purchased and installed the software, that just as you would not allow it to put up a building without a wheelchair ramp or an elevator inside, you shouldn't allow it to buy multimillion dollars software that gets updated or replaced every 5-10 years with software that can't at least easily be made accessible with JAWS.

I think it's fair to say the trial court has sort of ignored the argument and said that's wrong. The fourth circuit didn't deal with it at all. We argued that because 504, Section 504 and Title II are to be construed together and as requiring basically the same things, that Title II required program accessibility, that there were varying standards under the regulations, new construction has to be completely accessible, renovated facilities have to be accessible to the extent -- I forget exactly what the language is. Slightly lower standard. And on old stuff that's not been renovated, it's whatever you can do at a reasonable cost but that under either the new standard or the major renovation, no matter how you want to describe it, that the call center had to be made accessible.

And the fourth circuit in a footnote dismissed the Title II claim and in a footnote said, well because the ex-ante argument is only raised in the context of Title II, we don't have to deal with it.

And I went back and actually looked again today. It says right in the section heading that the district court erred in not finding ex-ante Title II and in Section 504 so I'm not exactly sure why we got the result we did.

My theory is that somebody didn't want to write an opinion saying no. And did us maybe in the long run a favor by simply not reaching the issue.

Somehow -- so the issue we lost on may be the most important one, because somehow we got to be able to push employers and schools and others to take accessibility into account when they make their initial purchases. Otherwise plaintiffs are always going to lose or most often are going to lose when they bring claims and say that they're not easily accommodated. They're losing one of two ways. Either they'll just lose their job or will not be hired because the expense of remediating the inaccessible software is so big that it looks like, well, for one person, we're not talking about an ergonomic keyboard for $25 or a brighter light or whatever it might be. We're talking about a computer fix that might be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you look at the undue hardship, not everybody is going to be so lucky as to have an employer for whom $123,000 really isn't very much. In fact, we get this in the trial court brief but couldn't get it into the trial,

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the year before the county said it wouldn't spend the money, we said it was necessary to remediate the software, they spent $63,000 on a secure bathroom for the county executive.

So, you know, you have to have your priorities.

So because -- and I don't have a solution. I frankly don't have a solution to this. The Title I sort of paradigm of reasonable accommodations isn't going to work on large purchases. If you've already built the building and there's no elevator to the third floor, nobody is going to put in an elevator so somebody using a wheelchair can work up there. And the same is true for electronics.

That gets us to a case I'm helping Tim Elder with. There he is. The Title I argument that we had been attempting to make is that the cause -- Title I outlaws the standards or criteria or methods of administration that have the effect of discrimination on the basis of disability that these same practices that would violate Title II violate Title I. And it's actually the Reyazuddin case provides this as well. After it got sued for not moving her to the call center the first time, she went to the interview when she applied to go there the second time a couple of years later and discovered that the county thought of the job qualifications that you had to be able to see. They didn't say it quite like that. They said, there is a vision exam required for working in the call center.

At deposition, you know, I asked the guy, would she have passed the eye exam? And he said, well, no, probably not. It's a job requirement now. You have to be able to see.

But it's clearly, if nothing else, it's a job requirement that at least has a disparate impact on blind employees, and Tim has persuaded me, against much resistance on my part, that in the ADA, you don't need a large class of people to show disparate impact. Sort of logically follows that unlike race or gender discrimination cases, there are just never going to be enough individuals with the same disability applying for a single job or working for a single employer to be able to show that, well, women on average make 50% of the amount of money that men do and they get promoted less often or get segregated into this job or that job.

So I guess that's my next effort, is to try to do this similar cases under Title I or move to a jurisdiction where Title II is considered to still cover employment.

And then sort of the last -- my last thought on the topic is that this is already hurting people who are not yet in the workforce. Obviously computers are playing a bigger and bigger role. Of course not only computers. One of the principle things that she was using and unable to do in the new call center is answer the telephone because the county somehow managed to make that even impossible. Some new computer device they're using to answer the phone.

But under the Affordable Care Act with the emphasis on digital health records, that of course impacts individuals in medical practices or insurance companies who are supposed to be working with medical records. It's also immediately affecting vocational

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students. I'm representing a young woman in Arizona who was in a medical coding program. She's supposed to learn how to put these various codes in that are used by insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid for processing billing. The university has a sort of student version of the medical records software that's used by hospitals. It is completely inaccessible. The university is sort of halfheartedly trying to accommodate her by providing her with a sighted assistant to work with this program, this computer program. That of course isn't going to happen in the workplace. And it's not really -- it's no longer the student doing the work. But the solution that was proposed to her by her counselor was that she find a different profession to seek employment in. Not that they do something about this in the software.

So it's a problem. It's going to be more of a problem. And I wish I could be more cheerful about that.

I do want to just quickly say that the -- Dan?

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Sorry.

JOE ESPO: You want the microphone, Dan?

I just quickly want to say, we didn't have quite the fight that everyone, the folks who were up here earlier had with the L.A. sidewalks, but the county used its own lawyers. There's really something awful about litigating against people who aren't paying their lawyers any extra money for doing the case. They were completely unreasonable. They have never offered any kind of settlement that had any hope of going anywhere. Dan and Tim tried the case, the three of us with legal authority from the back row that Dan was holding up on his computer to read to the judge when they were talking about jury instructions. Our paralegal did a spectacular job. Suzy McPherson helped us with jury consultant work. It was an amazing effort, and we had a wonderful client. This has been going on for, I don't know, since 2009 for her. She has never wavered that what she wants is the accessible call center, and, you know, it doesn't matter what else the county offers her. So she's in for the fight, and hopefully next year we'll be able to tell you what the injunctive relief she won was and she'll be in there working in the call center.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Thank you, Joe.

(Applause.)

Before we get to the Lainey, I want to mention that in your materials we also have the decisions in the Lamone case. This is out of the fourth circuit involving Maryland's online ballot marking tool and requirement that it must be accessible. Another great victory that just came out in February. And then of course a Scribd case that came out just a little over a year ago where the judge denied Scribd's motion to dismiss stating that the internet is indeed a place of public accommodation. Scribd is basically a publication type service that you can get for a subscription. And I wish we could talk in more depth about those cases but we don't have the time. But the materials I think are

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going to be very useful because not only are the decisions in there, but the briefing is in there and that can help you understand the arguments, the most effective arguments to be made in these kinds of cases.

So to talk about structured negotiations and other significant victors and other work that's going on in this arena, here is Lainey Feingold.

(Applause.)

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Thank you, Scott.

This might surprise everyone but I'm not going to spend my whole ten minutes talking about structured negotiation. Because at the last part of the last session, I want to give a little bit of a big picture overview.

But real quick, first of all, I did not invent structured negotiation. I coauthored it with Linda Dardarian who can not only fight against the best of them in Los Angeles but has been in 80% of the structured negotiations with me.

Our first website case was in 2000 when Bank of America agreed to be the first online banking platform to be accessible and in accordance with the standards that we discussed this morning and Jonathan, in our session.

I don't have good war stores because somehow structured negotiation works and we have worked in collaboration with some of the biggest companies in the country on these issues. The three most recent, we did a deal with Houston metro with the disability rights Texas. Is someone still here from disability rights Texas? Yeah?

Anyway, really great, the case was assigned to Chris Fagrial, his first structured negotiation, a case about transited agency website in mobile application.

Denny's. A blind person couldn't access the nutritional information on their website. Like who wants nutritional information from Denny's, but I realized it's kind of like a privileged thing because a lot of people eat there. They have a lot of food and it doesn't cost a lot of money and she wasn't able to convince them to -- they probably could have fixed the PDF and that would have been enough but since they didn't, they went into structured negotiation with us and we had a settlement.

And the other one, we should is issuing a press release in the next two weeks, Linda and I did a negotiation with Bank of America who has been a great partner ever since our first case with them in 2000, but still, given their size, things do fall through the cracks. But when they do, we have the tool of structured negotiation to go back to them and say, hey, you have there problem, you know, if it's a little problem, we call them up and they fix it. But this was a big problem. Their whole mortgage suite, mortgage information for blind people and we had a blind mortgage holder who just couldn't get what she needed so we did another structured negotiation and they did a robust comprehensive settlement that will be announced soon.

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I put materials in your handout. The American Bar Association is publishing my book this fall which will hopefully teach you how to practice structured negotiation. And on my website, you can read about the process, see all the agreements. Everything we've done is public.

Really what I would like to just leave us with and one of the things that so great about DRBA is the incredible community and different strategies around digital access that is have really pushed this issue in the right direction despite the lack of regulations from the Department of Justice. So the strategies that have been effective for digital accessibility, web, when we say digital access, we mean websites, mobile applications, kiosks, voting systems, employment systems, litigation as you just heard. I wanted to go last because I just am so full of admiration for Joe's work and Tim's work. Litigation has played a very important role in pushing the envelope forward.

And I feel that structured negotiation has played a really important role. The Department of Justice, they don't have regulations but Eve Hill and others, we have champions in the department. They are settling cases with private companies and public agencies. They're going to court and saying the ADA does cover websites. So all of these three strategies. And Department of Ed is doing good work. The work that Dan does in higher ed and the other people at Brown, Goldstein & Levy.

The strategies are really complementary. And I offer structured negotiations, Scott says it's better than litigation, but it is a different tool and in some cases may be the best tool for your clients and what they need.

All of these three strategies have resulted in a set of best practices, we have others here doing amazing work in digital access both in structured negotiations and litigation. All of us, because we have a community, or because we're communicating, we have developed a sense of best practices that in most of these agreements with justice or the litigated settlements have the same, you know, there's really ten. I won't go into them now but sort of ten high level items of good web accessibility standard, good consultants, good training. There's a list of ten things that are really the best practices we're all using.

And I really want to invite any of you who do want to get into this area, call us. When I say us, I mean all of us. Us up here and Larry and Dan and everyone who is doing the work, because it's a really -- you don't want this area to go south. It's really, we've made good progress and it's not just lawyers. There is an entire community of digital accessibility advocates who are relying on us to push the law in the right direction. While they push their companies from inside. And push their schools.

You know, Linda and I do a digital legal update every year at CSUN, 5,000 people there, not that lawyers. I should have mentioned Tim before, doing great work on mobile accessibility. All of us are available to you guys who want to get into it. And we really encourage you, because there aren't so many cases. Most of the great decisions that come out usually end up with a settlement afterwards. So you're not really seeing if

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you look up on -- I don't even do research anymore. But if you look it up somewhere, you won't see these ten best practices. But we all know them and we want to share with you. And there are starting to be lawyers in the field who are not in this room and I don't even know if I want to say they're in the field who are filling cases, sending demand letters on web access, and there's a lot of concern and commotion about them, and we're in touch with them. Dan has offered to, get this, Dan is the good cop and we are really wanting in the field practicing to know what the resources are to understand the community. It's an international community. I'm going to Stockholm next week to do the digital access update because they want to know what's going on in the U.S., you guys are pushing the envelope and what can we do here.

Twitter is very active. So we're here with the incredibly strong community in DRBA. This community is feeding a much broader digital accessibility community fueled by the NFB and the ACB and the digital accessibility champions.

I'm just really glad to be here. So thank you.

(Applause.)

SCOTT LaBARRE: All right. Time for questions and comments. And obviously I can't see you, so holler out your name.

>> Mary Vargas. My question is for Joe. We've taken a discrimination case to a jury trial and we'll be doing it again in June. I would like to know your perspective. How did you guys argue intent to the jury? What did you say to them and why do you think they didn't bite?

JOE ESPO: I don't think that was the issue. We'll never know for sure. Because the jury found liability -- there were two liability issues you in our case. One was failure to accommodate, which doesn't require intent. You just don't do it.

The other was disparate treatment which arguably does require intent. And I think the judge instructed that way and the jury found in our favor on that.

I think what we didn't succeed at persuading the jury was that there was any harm to the plaintiff. And clearly partly our failure to get the evidence that would have persuaded the jury.

I suspect, although I, again, I'll never know this for sure, that there was a compromise in the jury room because shortly before the verdict, we got sort of a series of notes, we're stuck on this question, we're stuck on that question. The last note we got was, are there any days in the next seven or fourteen or something that we won't have to be here.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: And they had been out four days.

JOE ESPO: Yeah. At that point. The judge said, well you won't have to come in this weekend. And pretty soon after that, we had a verdict. So it may have been, I'll give

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you liability if it doesn't cost them anything. But the jury of course doesn't know about the follow on proceedings.

And I know that happened in the Arganey case that you tried. I mean, I think I have to revisit the question of whether -- well, there are a couple of things I think need to be done. One is some expert can explain why sitting around getting paid to do nothing causes anybody any harm. And again, we, in the work we do, take for granted that there's an element of job satisfaction that we get from what we do. I think depending on the jobs that the jurors have, they may think, jeez, I go shovel cow manure all day, what kind of job satisfaction do you think I get. She's getting paid. She's discriminated against, I get that, but so what. So somebody to explain in whatever the particular case is about why it is in fact harmful to suffer discrimination.

And then because somehow it's got to be related to the plaintiff, I mean, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that maybe go seek somebody who can at least give us an opinion about whether we might want to call them as a witness.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: The other part of Mary's question, how do we show deliberate indifference.

JOE ESPO: Oh. In this case, it was easy. I mean, she had been telling them for years that I need this. And they just didn't do it. There was no -- actually, let me back up. It may be that we don't know if we did. We clearly convinced them it was intentional. I guess the jury could have come to the conclusion it came to without finding deliberate indifference, although it's hard to imagine given our facts what they were. I'm not sure -- I know that's an issue in hospital cases among deaf consumers when they go and the hospital says the VRI doesn't work or you didn't call an interpreter or whatever it is.

In employment, it's one on one and it's hard to know about.

>> On the health records students, I don't know if you can boot strap it. It has to be accessible for the patients. I don't know how the systems work, but it seems to me that it would make sense for the system to be integrated. Obviously that's too obvious.

JOE ESPO: I don't know the answer to that.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: It's just it's not -- unfortunately it's not the same thing.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Health and Human Services forgot that people with disabilities work in the healthcare industry.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: Can I just say, if you're interested in all this, on my website I have a legal update tab and I do updates twice or three time as I year of everybody's cases, not just the ones I do. So if you're curious, I put in settlements and press releases.

>> Hi. Follow-up question for Tim. I was interested sort of in the Harvard MIT argument about the lack of individualized requests for auxiliary aids. Is that just coming from them

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applying the interactive process under Title I or is there something I haven't thought about in Title II that would impose that obligation or at least raise a good argument?

TIM FOX: First of all, it's just such a silly argument but I think what they're trying to do is piece together a couple of different parts from Title III where they have, quote, the flexibility to decide what kind of auxiliary aid to provide and then they take that and say that there needs to be an individualized request and team that up to say that means we don't need to provide across the board captioning. Which makes no sense. I mean, factually, we went to them on behalf of NAD long before we filed suit and said NAD members would like captions. So even if that was legitimate, which it's not, but I think as I said, I think they're trying to take something that is in a very different situation appropriate for someone who has unique needs and turn it into a way to not provide something that's obvious for a class of persons who are deaf.

>> Joe, it would be more than heart breaking to think that your case may end up without victory. I'm sure it won't and I hope to suggest a couple of things to offer some help.

First of all, I'm willing to bet that an initial procurement the county violated (inaudible) laws. You might find it easy to find. The laws are so complicated. The question is to find out if there is one to challenge the award.

Second of all, it seems to me that the incorporation into the job requirements for the call center of a vision requirement is exact little the smoking gun that you need. That is where you see the clear evidence of excluding a whole class of people with disabilities. Otherwise there's no reason for it. Second amendment.

Third possibility is this. If you want to look for evidence about the corrosive impact about work and no work, one place might be to look in the united federation of teachers in New York. Good teachers and what they call rubber rooms. There might be some evidence there, sociological and psychological that you could draw upon.

Fourth, now that we know these cases are ADA cases and Title I cases, what is the role of manifesting the potential of EEOC?

JOE ESPO: It would be wonderful to have the EEOC pushing on this rather than having to do it individually. I don't have any particular feel for what the EEOC's position is on that. Maybe someone else in the audience does.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: The Chicago office is very interested in doing -- and they're the best regional office so far as I can tell. They are very interested in doing a workplace technology case. The only question is, who do you think and this is not a rhetorical question, but do you think you're going to do it better or do you think EEOC is going to do it better. And so maybe instead you want to wait for EEOC regs. But if you're going to do one where you want to see EEOC pursue it, we got Chicago excited about the issue of inaccessible online job testing, and now job assessment testing, and now they're excited about the issue of workplace technology.

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TIM FOX: And something else is I should have said, DOJ and DOB submitted a statement of interest in our case that has really nice language about their position that Title III does apply to websites, along with a number of the other issues raise the by the universities. So they said we could use that in our case as a statement of interest.

>> Lainey, I was wondering if you had a structured negotiation work with a governmental entity, because you've mentioned a lot of big companies it's worked with. And today, just you from this presentation and the last one, we've heard of two places where negotiation didn't seem to work with governments. And also with these big institutions like Harvard and MIT.

And it seems like such a waste of public resources that they won't come to the table and pay the same amount of money plus attorneys' fees rather than just deal with it early on. I didn't know if you had success.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: That's a good question. We have done structured negotiation with public entities. We did the city of San Francisco on their pedestrian accessibility signals. We did the Houston metro on the mobile app. And I think Amy and Tim just did the city of Denver.

TIM FOX: Curb cuts.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: The difference is, you really have to work with yourself and the clients on the patience factor. Patience is a quality that really helped with structured negotiation. At the end of the book I have a whole chapter on qualities and how they impact your ability to statement at the table.

City of San Francisco, if we didn't have the confidence in the process and the optimism and the client's commitment to waiting, there were many junctures where the towel could have been thrown in and we didn't throw it in and we got a really great comprehensive agreement. But I think there's more challenges.

There's also some benefits because like in the city of San Francisco, they were getting pressure from outside our negotiations because they're a public entity. Disability commission. That actually worked to our advantage. So yeah. Good question.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Any other questions or comments?

All right. Well, I want to thank Tim and Joe and Lainey for an excellent panel.

(Applause.)

And we're now going to move into our business session. I do think that with respect to some of the issues that were just raised, we really need to start perhaps expanding our horizons and reaching out to some others who have done similar kind of work. For example, reaching out to national employment lawyers association, NELA, about how to communicate some of these damage issues and how to say that even if there isn't a large loss of income or no loss of income, how do you explain the emotional and

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psychological toll that exists. And maybe even talking with some of the personal injury bar about that would be helpful too.

So these are things to think about and further alliances we can have.

Before we get much further along in the business meeting, I just want to toss out a couple of thank yous. We had a committee working on planning and developing this annual meeting. Linda Dardarian and myself, along with Mehgan, Valerie, and Kelly from BBI. And I want to thank all of these folks for their hard work, particularly at this meeting. Mehgan and Valerie and Kelly for just organizing everything and making sure that we're running on time and that we have whatever we need to make a great meeting.

I also want to thank the staff here at the NFB for putting on great food throughout these two days and helping to us have a great lunch.

(Applause.)

Tammy and her team, I want to toss out those thank yous. I think I'll grab this mic over here and look at my notes. Okay. First thing I wanted to do was talk about our governing structure as DRBA. We have a board. I believe the board is 16 members now. And I am not sure who from the board is here or not. I know some of you are. But I don't want to take the risk of forgetting somebody. I can say for certain about the officers. I am serving is currently as chair of our board. Linda Dardarian is our vice chair. William Myhill is our secretary. And Amy Robertson is our treasurer. And as I say, I know many of our other board members are here, but why don't we get somebody with a mic and please announce yourself and say who you are and where you're from.

>> Michael Bien from San Francisco.

>> Sasha from D.C.

>> Jasmine.

>> Rabia Belt.

>> Mehgan Sidhu from National Federation of the Blind.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Anybody else? Marc Maurer is on the board as well. I don't know if he's in the room or not.

>> He is.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Anybody else?

Okay. And we have a few others that aren't here unfortunately.

Our board meets telephonically every other month. And we, as you know, for five years now have been planning this annual meeting, and it works very, very well to hold it in conjunction with the tenBroek law symposium, for a variety of reasons, including of

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course the ability to use the facilities and the two entities, the symposium and our meeting, just fit so well together in many, many respects.

Now, the problem with that, though, of course is Baltimore is way over here on the east coast, and we have a lot of people on the west coast that makes it a little more difficult to participate.

So what we're going to be doing this year is holding a west coast conference. October 20th in Los Angeles. CREEC is helping us to sponsor that event. Is anybody here from that planning committee and can talk for a minute about what we're planning at our west coast conference?

>> They're all on the west coast.

(Laughter.)

SCOTT LaBARRE: What we're going to be doing is circulating information on the listserv regarding the conference. Michelle has been working and heading up that committee. So we'll be hearing soon about how to register for that conference and what the agenda plans to be.

It will also hold a diversity theme and figure out a way that we can increase our diversity and inclusion and work more collaboratively with some of these other movements.

Speaking of that, I know we mentioned it at the beginning of the meeting, but I do want to urge everybody to fill out the survey that is being circulated. I think I saw it on the list this afternoon. William sent it out. So please do that as soon as you can. It will take about 10 minutes or so.

I wanted to just give you a very brief picture of our financial situation. We have a budget of roughly, just under $60,000, about $55,000. And in 2015 we were able to bring in almost $4,000 more than our expenses.

This large measure, we would not be able to do it without generous gifts from the community. National Federation of the Blind has been giving roughly $25,000 every year. Burton Blatt contributes. Brown, Goldstein & Levy 5,000 a year. CREEC, so on and so forth. So we rely on these generous donations.

And also in the last year, we've now been able to rely on some dues. So we collected roughly $15,000 in dues this last year.

Speaking of dues, they are now officially due for 2016. One hundred dollars a year. So please make those arrangements as soon as you can.

The next thing that I wanted to talk about is membership criteria. As we grow, it is constantly a question about who the membership ought to be and who we wish to allow and who we don't, because we want to create an environment that allows us to exchange information freely and know that we do not have to be concerned about anything that we say or think getting into the hands of the traditional opposition.

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Certainly the defense bar shares a lot of information and ideas about how to defendant these cases. Similarly, they would not want that information getting back to us if they could help it.

So the same sort of principle applies to the DRBA.

So guess Sasha, one of our board members, you heard him introduce himself, will lead us in a discussion about a couple of issues that we've been grappling with as a board. And we thought, since this meeting was coming up, that we would toss the question out to the membership and see what people think about some of these issues.

So Sasha, do you want to take it away?

>> Thank you, Scott. I'm not going to say very much because we want to do listening more than talking on this issue. Just so you guys know, what the process is, we get applications for people to join, and then those applications go before the board, and most of them we look at them and quickly say, yes, no problem, when we get the army of Brown, Goldstein & Levy applications. There's not much objection to that.

(Laughter.)

We have had a couple of applications that have brought us up short. Not sure whether we have grounds to reject these people but not sure that we're comfortable accepting them into our group. And broadly, those two categories are this: One is people who have disability practices but are in large defense oriented firms. And I think it's pretty obvious after this last panel discussion that we have heard why that is an issue for us. We're not just disability rights lawyers; we're mostly aligned with plaintiff side lawyers in general. Employment lawyers, civil rights lawyers, class action lawyers. There's all kinds of things where we are just not aligned with defense counsel, and even if they're doing disability rights work on behalf of some of the same people, we don't want to be -- we're not necessarily comfortable with them in our closed forum. So that's the one group.

The second group is these lawyers, I think you all are familiar with them, who bring these cookie cutter lawsuits. Let's say one plaintiff hitting 50 places in Title III areas.

I think as a group we like to think of ourselves not just as plaintiffs' side disability lawyers, but as strategic thinkers about how to move the movement forward. And I think a lot of us are uncomfortable about what to do with people who may not be part of the movement and strategy that we're trying to pursue.

And there's been vigorous argument both ways about whether we want to bring these people into the fold to try to make them more strategic or whether it's just going to be disaster having them be part of our group.

And with that said, I would like to throw it open and hear from you guys, the members, if anyone has news on these.

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>> Hi, I'm Amy Robertson with CREEC. On the first, I think there's so much we do to try to take cases that move the law forward. That's very, very different and antithetical to what a lot of big defense firms do. I would not go that way.

But I feel differently about the second group, because they're there and they're not going away and a lot of times they're doing dumb things that make bad law. And if we can be a resource to help them do slightly smarter things and not make bad law, I think that's something that we should do. So I would be in favor of a slightly larger tent in that respect.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: As usual, Amy speaks wisdom. We had two lawsuits out in the ninth circuit. One against eBay and one against Facebook, where the ninth circuit quickly said, you know, the ADA doesn't apply here. And it fell to me to talk to the plaintiffs' lawyers and convince them not to petition for cert and convince them not to seek en banc. If I had taken the approach that, okay, so I'm talking to you to affect our organization, I don't think that would have been terribly successful.

And then we've had CK Lee out in New York filling all these cases, the Coca-Cola cases, which have been an unmitigated disaster and some web cases that have worked out okay. And then we got Bruce Carlson filing on cases in the western district of Pennsylvania and he made a bad settlement in Redbox but with whom we're now working to undue the bad settlement cooperatively. And they're not going away.

We can take two approaches and we can say we're going to keep you out and let you wreak havoc, or we can say, some of us aren't perfect either, come on in, let's talk. Larry and Sam don't need our help. They're already great. The ones who are out there doing this stuff who can use our help, in doing so, we can help move them in the right direction. At least, you know, and make them pay for drinks. Right?

(Laughter.)

But you know, when I was in the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, we had the shrubs in with the good criminal defense lawyers all in the same room and I don't think it did anybody any harm or washed off on us.

(Laughter.)

>> I guess I'm adding to the chorus because my view is the same.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Who is this?

>> Karla Gilbride. Sorry.

I think one reason to include people in this category is because they're asking to be included. There's some self-selection going on. If people think, hey I don't need to talk to these people, I'm filling my cases and making money and doing whatever it is, they won't seek us out. But the people you're dealing with who are submitting applications, they're seeking us out and want to gain something from being part of this community.

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Related to that, I just have a very visceral reaction to the subjectivity of saying, you know, where do you draw the line of saying someone isn't strategic enough in their thinking? I think we can all look at extreme examples on the end of the continuum, but I think it is a continuum and there is something that seems a little elitist or arbitrary about the people on the inside deciding what lawyers are sort of, quote/unquote, good enough to be part of our ranks. So I would be concerned about wielding that kind much power.

LAINEY FEINGOLD: This is Lainey. I want to speak to this because I've been struggling with this for the last couple of months, as Linda, Dan, and Larry know. We've had a lot of conversations. People have come into the web field. Many of them are filling demand letters that I consider shake down letters without plaintiffs, even when the defense asks for them. It's I feel a very huge problem. These people are hurting the progress we have made. They may not hurt a case, but on the issue of web accessibility, it's been very, very troubling.

That said, I kind of think letting them in, as long as they meet the criteria, and I will say this, we have to be very careful of the criteria because at least one of these lawyers is at a defense firm and they're doing these plaintiffs' cases. Those people cannot be allowed in if they are part of a defense firm. They themselves have been doing defense cases and then they see there's more money on the other side and they're switching.

So I would say a basic PI lawyer who suddenly sees these drive by cases, if they're real plaintiffs' lawyers, only doing plaintiffs' work, I kind of reluctantly have to agree that we should take them in but we can't be afraid to -- we may be having to express things that go unexpressed here. Like I don't think there's anyone in this room who would send a demand letter without identifying an organizational or individual client. We just wouldn't. We take it for granted that that's not what you do.

So I guess I come down on, if they are really plaintiffs' lawyers, we have to let them in, and hopefully set a standard for them in their practices.

SCOTT LaBARRE: It sounds like to me that we have somewhat of a consensus with regard to the drive by lawyers, I like that, Lainey.

>> I have one more comment. This is Caroline Jackson. And one thought that I had was, it might be worth it for these people who seem to be in the middle ground to have an interview, to, you know, just talk to them and have them say a little bit about what they're -- why they're joining our listserv, what they are hoping to get out of it. Because there is a potential for damage to the community if it becomes less cohesive. And I think part of the reason why I'm raising this concern is as much to play devil's advocate as anything else because I'm aware of the bias that can come along when we start talking about trying to keep people out of our group. But, you know, for the people who are coming to our listserv with a general interest in doing more or doing better, then they should absolutely be welcome with open arms and not shut out because of the reputation of their employer. And I would hope we could have some sort of interview process where we could tell and perhaps even the fact that we interview somebody

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could leave an impression on them because we're putting a human face on this organization and on our cause.

>> This is Rachel Langston, and I don't know, I would just echo that. My main concern when we talk about this is the listserv, because I think here when we're all having a conversation and it's directed and we're on the same page and talking about the same thing and there's a context in which we're talking about things.

But my concern is if you give certain people who are kind of doing damaging drive by litigation, if you give them access to the listserv and they ask a general question and basically get help to do things that we don't want to be part of helping them do. I don't know if that makes sense. But just in general, a basic question could come out and be used to do something that is not helpful into the movement and into what we're trying to do.

So I guess my main concern about that would be listserv access and the possibility of that being misused.

>> First of all, I think we all know in this day and age, it would be naive to believe that anybody who wanted to find out about our listserv would be unable to do it.

We certainly have a right, though, to make sure that we can all be as comfortable as possible in carrying on our deliberations and talking on the listserv. I think we all agree on that basis alone that excluding people who work for defense oriented firms or affiliated with them is proper. They have an inherent conflict of interest and may even have a saboteur's intention in some cases and I don't think they should be admitted.

The issue seems to be about the drive-bys. If our concern is with our own reputation, that would be a little bit too precious and self serving. If our concern is with the field and development of the law in this area as it affects our clients and people we want to serve, then that is the real issue, what should we do.

I think Caroline had a good idea. It's not an all or nothing situation. I think we should see anyone with a different set of values and assumptions as we do, talk to them, welcome them if they seem amenable after a suitable interview. If they seem amenable to I won't say to being reconstructed or at least to being educated. And if they don't, then we should not. I think it's possible for us to make those distinctions with a fair degree of confidence and accuracy and I think that's what we should do.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Are there any other comments because I think we need to move.

>> I just have one. This is Kelly from BBI. I just had an idea. I was thinking what if we had some sort of -- I don't know if I want to call it a disciplinary committee but a committee to guide a person acting outside the bounds that we felt was appropriate, either obviously sharing confidential information is one thing, but let's say there's somebody practicing in a way that we as a group agree, which I know is dangerous but I

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just wanted to offer that as a suggestion, maybe a committee that would approach this person and talk to them about it.

SCOTT LaBARRE: And incidentally, what we do have, our process is this. We get applications and BBI forwards them to the board. If there's any kind of question at all about an application, we have a committee which is made up of Sasha, William, and one other person, who go over the issues and contact the individual if necessary and then we address the issues at the next meeting of the board to talk about what we think of the questionable applicant.

So that's, just so you know, the process we're using.

Sasha, is there anything else you would like to say before we move on to the last item?

>> We have one more comment.

>> This is John Waldo. Kind of looping back to the last comment made talking about a disciplinary committee, I wonder if it would be possible for to us put together some sort of very, very simple kind of code of conduct with expectations that we ask people who are part of this group to adhere to and just ask them up front, are you comfortable with practicing in this manner and give them the chance to opt out. As well as us.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Okay. Sasha?

>> The last thing that I would say on this, I actually like that idea better than the interview suggestion because I don't know what questions I'm supposed to ask. It's too subjective at that point.

I think we just need to have something that we can put in writing that says, yes or no and it doesn't require much subjective thought.

SCOTT LaBARRE: We have some of that in the sense of what we say to people when they join, the welcome message.

However, I think we can craft that further and develop it into sort of expectations of members of DRBA.

All right. This has been a great discussion, and I hate cutting it off, but I know that Little Havana's is calling. And there is something very important we need to do. We still have a surprise, so please don't leave.

But Dan, could you come forward and just spend a few moments helping us reminisce on our 10-year anniversary? Dan Goldstein, depending on how you feel about DRBA, is to blame or to congratulate. I say congratulate. But it is Dan's efforts --

(Applause.)

-- that got this going and it really started in early -- well, probably sometime really in 2005 but by early 2006, Dan had been emailing a number of folks talking about this idea. I know I got a message from him in late February of 2006 saying, hey, we're

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thinking about forming this group, are you willing to participate in a formation committee essentially. And that committee had its first meeting via telephone on April 10, 2006, and that's what led to DRBA. We started the listserv in the fall of 2006. So to talk a little bit more about that time and how we formed, here's Dan Goldstein.

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Well, everybody should have their creation myths, so I hate to destroy the DRBA creation myth.

It was not my idea. Let's start with that. A law professor at Maryland, Mike Mellerman who throws off ideas approximately every three nanoseconds that had one that law schools should be doing horizontal, peer to peer education after law school is over and you've graduated. So Brenda, a former law clerk and then later law professor, was one of those who was sort of the cleanup brigade to actually implement the ideas that Michael throws off so quickly.

So she came to see me. She told me about that. She said, there's something called the law school consortium project, we have money, what would be helpful for people doing disability rights work.

I don't know. And I'm thinking, Brenda real little want and answer. I can't think of any good answers.

And she said, well, some of the other groups are doing a listserv. Would that be a good idea?

And I'm thinking, I have to say something, so I said, yeah, that's a great idea, Brenda.

And she said, how are we going to do this?

And I thought, oh, I thought all I had to do was tell you it was a great idea and I could go back to work.

So I said, well, let me email and call a few people. So that's what I did. I got ahold of Lainey and Scott, and I did realize these things cost money so I called Marc Maurer and said, does NFB want to give us some money and he said sure. We could not have done this without the National Federation of the Blind.

(Applause.)

And then I think I did everything possible to confirm that I'm not a good administrator and I was very thrilled to come off the board a year or two ago, but that's really how we got started, and the listserv just took off with fabulous people coming up with fabulous ideas. And I know I'm a way better lawyer for reading a listserv faithfully, which I do, and I think also we developed this incredible rapport that makes me look forward every year to seeing is you and drinking with you and trying to remember which stores and lies I've already told so I don't tell the same ones when we go drinking tonight.

But I did want to tell you one thing that for me encapsulates why we do this. And I've been floating on air because of this email all week. Jamie Principato was a client of

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mine, Florida State University freshman. The state of Florida requires a certain math class for any college degree anywhere. Their version used all inaccessible JPEGs for every problem. The most you could make out of the screen reader was question one, answer 104, answer 204, answer 304, answer 404. You know now everything Jamie could know using a screen reader.

She had the presence of mind to file an OCR complaint with the Department of Education, and the Department of Education decided it would be a good seat warmer and took her complaint and sat on it for most of the first year while she flunked math. Her boyfriend a year ahead of her flunked math. She bought a large screen TV to try to blow these things up because she had some slight vision.

By the time we got done with that case, she didn't think she was at all intelligent, she no longer desired to get a PhD in psychology, and she couldn't wait to get out of Florida State.

And in the intervening years, I've since gotten emails from her about the A pluses she is getting in every math class that she can take and how she does algebra theory problems when she's stressed. But I wanted to share with you this from this week.

In the past these updates have mostly just listed courses, this one is a bit different.

"I've been doing so much more lately than just going to class and completing homework."

By the way, I got her permission to share this today.

"As I mentioned previously, my college is the recipient of a NASA space grant and their undergraduate program is evolving. I play a leading role on our research team and am active both in a number of projects and am mentoring members of the team.

"Let me just say, there's something liberating about teaching a class of sighted freshman how to solder components to a circuit board. Since I joined the team, I designed and built three high altitude balloon payloads and one suborbital rocket payload.

"Presently I'm working with Colorado's first ever intercollegiate space team to design a rocket payload that will carry out three experiments in space during a rocket flight this summer. We're going to test the resilience of the DNA from mammals, plants, and bacterias from various accelerations, testing carbon fiber and epoxy material --"

I'm going to skip a bit with the technical.

"-- radiation detector of my own design. I'm a little biased about the last part but a detector is my baby," and she goes on to explain how she built this thing. "And the power button is wired up to an adrenal microcontroller so when the rocket takes off, it will turn on by itself triggered by G force and automatically start taking exposures at regular intervals until the battery dies. When a particle hits the magnesium, it will

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continue moving faster than light and travel through the substance due to refraction." Because she knows I'm not smart about these things, she breaks it down into sonic booms so I can understand that and goes on to explain why there's going to be an image on the sensor when one of these passes through.

"Detectors like this have been built in the past but none as tiny as ours, smaller than a deck of cards, or as inexpensive. We're going to test a prototype on high altitude balloon in a few weeks. If all goes well, I will be traveling to Virginia in June to a NASA facility where it will fly out to space.

"In other news, I was elected President of my school's astronomy club. People find it ironic that the President is blind, but there's so much in outer space that we can't see that I think it's particularly appropriate.

"I am also in the process of designing and building a solar spectroscope that can autonomously track the sun during high altitude balloon flight."

And then she goes on to describe it in detail saying that NASA may commission it to fly in August 2017 during a solar eclipse to collect spectroscopic data on the moon's atmosphere, whatever that is.

"Outside of school, I've been really successful as a private tutor. I contract at the Colorado Center for the Blind and have gone from just one student last February in algebra --"

Three Fs she got in math at Florida State.

"I've gone from just one student last February to more than 15 ranging from prealgebra to calculus. I have a lot of opportunity to practice the subject I love and learn about the challenges that face many blind students when they transition from high school to college math.

With my students' consent, I've been collecting anonymous data from the time I get them to when they graduate, and all of them come in with the same misconceptions about their own inabilities in math, often learning from sighted teachers who don't know how to teach them. In fact, they're all quite talented once they have real access to it and a fair chance to learn it.

"This inspired me to do a lot of thinking and begin writing about structured discovery as a viable technique to teaching mathematics."

She goes on to say how much more there is she could tell me and, in fact, it goes on to tell me.

(Laughter.)

But --

>> The last part. Come on.

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DAN GOLDSTEIN: Okay. I'm going to her commencement on May 14th.

(Applause.)

But this is why we do this. This is why we do this. This is not our accomplishment. It's her accomplishment. But she never could have had it without access. And then she got access and she's gone as high as those rockets.

That's all I wanted to share.

(Applause.)

>> This is Lainey. I just want to mention Harriet McBryde Johnson, an amazing disability rights leader. Her book is called "Too Late to Die Young." She was very active in the beginning. I got to be her friend through the listserv and we got a visit in before she died. I just wanted to bring her into the room.

SCOTT LaBARRE: Thank you very much, Lainey. I'm sorry I forgot you were going to do that so thanks for jumping in.

The surprise is that we are now going to start I think a tradition that we'll call upon when it is earned and meritorious. And it certainly is in this case.

We have created what we are calling the Disability Rights Bar Association equal justice award. And the inaugural recipient of said award is Dan Goldstein.

(Applause.)

Here you go. Here is a plaque. And I want to read what it says. It says:

"Disability Rights Bar Association Equal Justice Award presented to Daniel Frank Goldstein in recognition of your outstanding and meritorious service to persons with disabilities and DRBA. You are a true pioneer who has blazed new trails, securing equal justice under law for all. We call you our champion with deep respect and our friend with great love. April 1, 2016."

(Applause.)

And I could say a lot more, Dan, but I really believe the inscription sums it up. You were very humble in your description of the formation of DRBA. You were the glue that stuck us together. You have done so much for so many of us. For me, you've been a tremendous mentor, and we all thank you for your great service. So congratulations, Dan.

(Applause.)

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Thank you very much.

I cannot think of a greater honor than to be honored by the people in this room, who I hold in such, such high regard. Thank you.

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(Applause.)

SCOTT LaBARRE: Now, there's another surprise coming for you, Dan, a little bit later at the reception but it's appropriate for the reception so I'll leave that be for the moment.

Speaking of which, our reception this evening is free to our members, but that's because Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the National Federation of the Blind, and everybody involved in that, thank you.

As a reminder, the shuttles will leave at 5:15 from the Wells Street entrance, the main entrance off the first floor here when you go down. The main floor.

A reminder that the garage will stay open here at the federation until midnight, so if you don't get your car before then, you won't get it until tomorrow.

I think we've covered all the details.

>> One announcement before everyone leaves. I'm also on the board of National Association of Attorneys, and we are trying to hopefully be as successful as DRBA and I know we have a lot of crossover. If anyone wants to join, we're still getting things going. Talk to me or Deepa, find our website. We're still trying to get members and hopefully get to the point that ten years from now we'll be in this position. The difference is disability rights attorneys versus attorneys with disabilities.

SCOTT LaBARRE: You get a coupon for one free drink this evening. After that, cash bar.

Again, thank you for being here. I think it's been a tremendous meeting. Thanks to everybody who helped, to all our panelists, Valerie, Mehgan, and Kelly. We'll see you at little Havana's.

(Meeting ended at 5:09 p.m.)

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