DALLAS – Just as Congress is poised to ease the proliferation of lawsuits over ATM fee disclosures, a new kind of legal peril is facing credit unions over the Americans With Disabilities Act and its newly effective requirement to make all ATM accessible to the blind.
A blind Texas women has sued 19 credit unions and banks, including JSC FCU, Members Choice CU, Premier America CU, and Primeway FCU, over their alleged failure to comply with the provisions of the law, which include making ATMs voice accessible.
The plaintiff in the cases, Victoria Gilkerson, who has teamed with the Delaware-based Blind Ambitions Group on the suits, says she had a valid ATM card when her driver took her to the various machines to test them for accessibility to the blind after the March 15 effective date for the new rules. In her suits, Gilkerson asks for class action status, meaning it could cost the credit unions to both upgrade their ATMs expeditiously and to pay damages to numerous plaintiffs.
Officials at JSC FCU and Primeway FCU declined to comment. But one lawyer involved in the credit union cases worried that new ADA suits like these pose an emerging legal peril for credit unions. “This is the new wave,” he said.
Gilkerson is represented by R. Bruce Carlson, a prolific tort lawyer from Pittsburgh, who also represents Robert Jahoda, a legally blind Pittsburgh man who has sued 20 area credit unions and banks over ADA violations. He also represents another woman who has filed at least five ADA suits. In several cases settled by Jahoda, the credit union or bank signed a consent decree agreeing to upgrade their ATM to comply with the ATM and paid no damages, except tens of thousands of dollars of fees paid to Jahoda’s lawyer, Carlson.
Carlson did not return phone calls or email messages but he told the Credit Union Journal’s sister publication American Banker in an email message earlier this year that his law firm’s aim is to force compliance with the law. "I and my law firm have filed a number of lawsuits calculated to cause compliance with the requirements of this law,” he wrote. “We expect that the lawsuits that we filed will achieve the objective of Congress in that they will cause compliance with a law that the industry has known about for an extended period of time.”
The new flurry of suits comes as Congress is expected to pass a bill that would eliminate a requirement under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act that has prompted dozens of lawsuit, that is a requirement that ATM owners disclose the fees they charge non-customers on the outside of the machine—as well on-screen.
Several serial filers of EFTA suit have filed a new batch of suits with the impending of the law. A New Yorker named Don Anderson has filed a dozen new EFTA suits over the past two months, making more than actions 60 filed against credit unions and banks since the end of 2010.
