Nathan A Adams IV is a Partner in Holland & Knight's Tallahassee office.
In Mielo v. Steak 'N Shake Operations, Inc., 897 F. 3d 467 (3d Cir. 2018), the court of appeals ruled that disability rights advocates who brought a putative class action against an operator of a restaurant chain under the ADA satisfied the injury in fact, traceability and redressability test for Article III standing, but not the numerosity or commonality test for class certification. The plaintiffs alleged that they personally experienced difficulty ambulating in their wheelchairs through two steeply graded parking facilities at two restaurant locations. For numerosity, the plaintiffs pointed to the large number of handicapped persons in the U.S. but failed to present evidence on how many handicapped persons patronized the restaurant locations, let alone experienced ADA violations. The court was also not impressed that a single executive of the defendant speculated that thousands of disabled persons use Steak 'n Shake parking lots annually. Likewise, the wide variety of potential ADA violations captured in the broad class definition certified by the district court did not satisfy commonality because there were various types of ADA violations that could have occurred at the restaurants and even in their parking lots, from slope to signage, which could have harmed class members in materially different ways. Consequently, the appeals court reversed the district court's class certification and remanded the case for additional proceedings to determine if the plaintiffs could satisfy these requirements, e.g., by focusing on one type of ADA violation in a parking lot.
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