© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
(April 25) – Dallas-based BarBri, Inc. continues to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to properly accommodate blind law students who use BarBri’s online and other services to prepare for the bar exam, a lawsuit filed today in Dallas federal court claims.
In a class action lawsuit, three named plaintiffs are asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas to order BarBri, the largest bar exam preparation course provider in the country, to adjust its preparation services to fully accommodate blind law students and to compensate the dozens to hundreds of affected blind students that have each paid thousands of dollars to use BarBri’s preparation courses.
The three named plaintiffs, Claire Stanley, Derek Manners and Christopher Stewart, plan to take the July 2016 bar exam, which they need to pass in order to become licensed lawyers. Stanley, a May 2015 graduate of the University of California Irvine School of Law, also took the Pennsylvania bar exam last July but did not pass.
Manners, who received his Bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas, will graduate from Harvard Law School this spring. Stewart will also graduate this year from the University of Kentucky College of Law.
“BarBri’s refusal to make simple accommodations to give blind law students equivalent services doesn’t just set Claire, Derek and Chris back in their attempt to pass the bar; it sets back every blind person who wants to be a lawyer out there,” said Wayne Krause Yang, who is representing the named plaintiffs in the case.
“BarBri is a multibillion-dollar national corporation that has the resources to easily make the simple accommodations noted so that our clients and all blind people that want to become lawyers can easily use their services fully and equally,” added Krause Yang, who is the legal director for the Austin-based legal nonprofit organization, Texas Civil Rights Project.
Cindy Park, a spokesperson for BarBri, said the company has not yet been served with the lawsuit and is “currently investigating the matter.” She declined to provide further comment.
The 22-page lawsuit alleges that BarBri’s statement on its website that says it complies with the ADA is untrue. The company has refused to remove “several accessibility barriers to its mobile application, website and course materials” that hinder “blind students from entering the legal field by preventing them from fully, equally and adequately preparing for the bar exam,” according to the complaint.
When Stanley began studying for the bar exam last year, she contacted BarBri’s former national ADA director and requested that her textbooks, lecture notes and handouts be provided in an electronic format accessible to her needs. The director assured Stanley that BarBri would provide these materials in an accessible format, the complaint says.
But once Stanley started using BarBri’s materials, a glitch in the website’s practice multiple choice testing function prevented Stanley from reading the answer choices because they “appeared in an inaccessible flash window,” the lawsuit says.
She also had issues accessing all the functions for BarBri’s “Essay Architect” feature, which helps students write better for the essay portion of the bar exam. The function allows students to rearrange phrases in a pre-written essay by dragging and dropping the phrases, but it did not work for Stanley since the drag-and-drop function was not accessible to her screen reader software.
Stanley also claims that the Braille in BarBri’s Conviser “mini review” book, which provides an outline of materials that students should study for the bar exam, was improperly written so BarBri “made it extremely and unnecessarily difficult for [Stanley] to read the mini review.”
Stanley has twice complained to BarBri about the accessibility barriers – once individually and the other time through a formal letter written by a civil rights advocacy group on Stanley’s behalf – but BarBri has not taken any actions to address the issues and has failed to respond, the lawsuit says.
Krause Yang said “Derek and Chris are going to be experiencing [the same issues] over the summer” when they begin preparing for the bar. “The screen reading assistant devices that Derek and Christopher use are similar, if not identical, to the ones that Claire used.”
Currently, Stanley is living in Maryland and serving as a fellow of the federally mandated protection and advocacy agency for the rights of the people with disabilities in Washington, D.C. University Legal Services. She needs to pass the bar to fully represent her clients and fulfill her dream of becoming a civil rights attorney.
Manners has a job lined up at the international firm Allen & Overy, where he plans to practice political law – if he passes the bar. Stewart will serve as a federal law clerk after graduates. After his clerkship, he hopes to practice employment law and represent companies facing ADA and discrimination claims.
Joining Krause Yang in representing the individual plaintiffs are Abigail Frank and Hani Mirza, who are also lawyers at the Texas Civil Rights Project. The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs is representing the proposed class of plaintiffs.
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