Corporate Legal Risk: Your Website Might Be Your Biggest Liability

Your legal team reviews every marketing campaign before launch. Compliance approves every HR policy. Risk management oversees every contract. But your website? The one generating millions in revenue, hosting thousands of pages, accessed by millions of visitors? That gets built by developers with no legal oversight. This isn't security negligence. This isn't technical debt. This is a massive corporate liability that most legal departments don't understand exists.

Before your marketing team launches a campaign: A single marketing email touching 100,000 inboxes? Legal review required. Before your HR department releases a policy: An HR handbook affecting 500 employees? Multiple legal reviews before printing. Before your technology team launches a website or major feature: None of this typically occurs. Your website sits visible to millions. It hosts thousands of pages. It processes customer data. It generates millions in revenue. And it was built with zero legal accessibility review.

Consider the numbers: Your website has 1000x the exposure of a single marketing campaign. Yet marketing gets legal scrutiny and your website doesn't. Accessibility lawsuits aren't about single pages. They're systemic. A typical website audit finds: These aren't typos. They're systematic violations that repeat across every page. Accessibility litigation is accelerating: This isn't hypothetical. Your competitors are being sued. Your industry peers are settling cases. The question isn't if you'll face litigation—it's when. Here's what makes website accessibility different from a marketing campaign violation: One bad marketing email is one violation affecting one campaign. One bad website component is thousands of violations affecting thousands of pages—all simultaneously. If your product card component is missing alt text, that's not one violation. If you have 5,000 products, that's 5,000 violations. Multiply that by every page where that component appears (related products, search results, homepage features) and you're looking at 25,000+ violations on a single component error.

Most corporate attorneys aren't trained in web accessibility. They understand employment law, contracts, intellectual property, and regulatory compliance. But WCAG guidelines? Semantic HTML? Screen reader compatibility? These are outside their wheelhouse. Result: Legal departments treat websites as technical problems, not legal ones. Accessibility violations are invisible to sighted users. Your website looks perfect. It functions flawlessly for 84% of users. The marketing campaign looks great. The design is clean. The conversion funnel optimizes beautifully. The fact that 16% of your potential market can't use it? Invisible. Who owns website accessibility in your organization? No one owns it. So no one fixes it. And the risk accumulates silently. Your marketing department has KPIs. Your sales team has quotas. Your product team tracks NPS and engagement metrics. Your website's accessibility score? Unknown. Unmeasured. Unmanaged. You can't manage what you don't measure. So accessibility remains unmanaged.

Exposure: 100,000 recipients Legal review: Mandatory Compliance check: Yes Risk assessment: Conducted Launch without approval: Impossible Exposure: 500 employees Legal review: Mandatory Compliance check: Yes Risk assessment: Conducted Launch without approval: Impossible Exposure: 100M+ monthly visitors Legal review: Not standard Compliance check: Not standard Risk assessment: Not conducted Launch without approval: Standard practice Your website reaches 1000x more people than a marketing campaign. Yet it gets zero legal scrutiny compared to the campaign's comprehensive review.

The ADA applies to businesses providing goods and services to the public. Your website is providing services. Under ADA Title III, your website must be accessible to people with disabilities. Most legal departments understand this conceptually. Few understand it operationally. One inaccessible website page isn't a violation. 5,000 inaccessible pages is a pattern of discrimination. Most website accessibility lawsuits don't start in court. They start with demand letters. Plaintiffs send detailed accessibility audits listing specific violations. They request remediation and damages. This is where legal departments suddenly understand the issue exists. Website accessibility cases often become class actions. One plaintiff discovers your site is inaccessible. Instead of a single case, you're facing a class of potentially thousands of users who were excluded from your website. Damages multiply. Legal fees increase. Discovery becomes a nightmare. Your entire website becomes evidence. Here's a critical issue: most corporate general liability policies don't cover website accessibility violations. They cover product liability, premises liability, advertising injury—but not digital accessibility discrimination. Your company bears the full cost of a settlement.

Liability isn't something that happens when you get sued. Liability starts accumulating the moment your inaccessible website goes live. Every day it remains inaccessible: If a user was excluded from your website for 3 years due to accessibility failures, that's 3 years of evidence that your company knew (or should have known) about the problem and failed to fix it. The moment someone informs your company about an accessibility issue, your liability changes. You move from "didn't know" to "knew and didn't fix it." A demand letter isn't the beginning of the problem. It's proof of the beginning. The Department of Justice is actively enforcing ADA compliance. Federal agencies send compliance letters. State attorneys general pursue cases. Private firms file suits. Enforcement is accelerating, not slowing down.

Website accessibility compliance is fundamentally a legal risk mitigation function. It's no different from: Legal departments already manage these risks. Accessibility should be treated the same way. Here's the business case: fixing a website's accessibility issues costs far less than defending a lawsuit. Typical costs: Compared to: Prevention is dramatically cheaper than litigation. The accessibility landscape is changing. Organizations are waking up to the liability. In 3–5 years, accessibility will be as expected as security audits. Companies that address it proactively gain competitive advantage: