Date: June 17, 2026 ET
From: The complainant
To / Cc: To ADA Coordinator John Shiptenko (JohnS@gabar.org). Cc Deputy General Counsel William D. NeSmith III; Grievance Counsel Adrienne Nash; Deputy General Counsel Andreea N. Morrison; Assistant General Counsel Leigh Burgess; General Counsel Russell D. Willard; Chief Operating Officer Sarah I. Coole; Executive Director Damon E. Elmore; Human Resources Director Sandra Dixon; Governmental Affairs Director Jennifer McNeely; Ron Turner; Marie Doyrin; William C. Gentry; President Christopher P. Twyman; R. Javoyne Hicks; Shiriki Cavitt Jones; Immediate Past President Ivy N. Cadle.
Subject: Grievance Against John J. Shiptenko, Office of the General Counsel, State Bar of Georgia
Attachments: Memorandum grievance (PDF) and exhibit set (PDF).
Transcript (redacted):
Mr. Shiptenko,
You said I do not have to use the grievance form. You said I may submit a grievance as a document I generate with my voice to text tool.
I am doing exactly that.
My grievance against you is attached.
I sent you seventeen questions at 3:49 this afternoon. At 4:22, you answered one sentence of them. You sent that one sentence only to Mr. NeSmith and Ms. Nash.
In the letter you were answering, I wrote that the Bar narrows the room every time I ask a question about access, file placement, conflict routing, or the status of a defective dismissal.
You replied by narrowing the room again.
I have restored the full distribution.
Your response is now part of the issue. You told me to use my own voice to text tool to create a PDF. That is the tool I already paid for. I have paid thousands of dollars of my own money for software, printing, mailing, filing, preservation, and record organization because of the Bar’s mistakes, including rebuilding a file the Bar admits was incomplete when it dismissed my grievance.
An accommodation I paid for is not an accommodation the Bar provided.
My private software is not the Bar’s ADA program.
My paid assistive technology is not the Bar’s accessible filing route.
My ability to survive the Bar’s access barrier does not make the barrier fixed.
Your email also does not answer a question I have now asked more than once. It does not tell me how a person files a complaint about someone on this email chain. Several of the people I have raised concerns about are copied on this message. The current English form names no ADA Coordinator. Your email names no ADA Coordinator. The Bar still has not identified a conflict screened route for a grievance about a Bar official.
I am filing this grievance by email because you told me I could. I did not want to waste more time or more money, but your response was simply more of the same. It told me to work around the Bar’s problem instead of fixing the Bar’s problem.
That is the harassment I have been describing.
It is not abstract. It is the real process I am being forced to live through as a disabled person using assistive technology.
I identify the barrier.
The Bar does not fix the barrier.
The Bar tells me to work around the barrier.
The Bar then treats my privately paid workaround as its accommodation.
That is not access. That is burden shifting.
[redacted – outside the scope of this record]
You cannot harass a disabled complainant, shift the cost of the Bar’s mistakes onto him, ignore his written questions, narrow the room when he restores the record, and then act like this is normal.
Nobody would allow a disabled friend or family member to be treated this way and call it acceptable.
I am not going to call it acceptable either.
Each person copied here has now had repeated notice of the access problem, the file problem, the uncorrected dismissal, the unanswered conflict routing questions, the refusal to identify who authored the unsigned message about my assistive technology, and the continuing burden placed on me as a disabled person using voice to text.
A further grievance will follow once the Bar identifies the conflict screened route for submitting it to the people actually responsible for screening grievances against Bar officials.
Until then, I am preserving this record and filing through the route you told me I could use.
I am asking you to do four things now:
1. Confirm in writing that you received the attached grievance.
2. Give me the complaint number and the name of the reviewer assigned to it.
3. Tell me the process for filing and deciding a grievance about a Bar official, including how the Bar prevents that grievance from being screened, routed, influenced, or delayed by the person complained about.
4. Identify the ADA Coordinator by name for complaints about access barriers in the Bar’s own grievance process.
I used the door you opened, at my own expense, to file the grievance you said I could file.
Please confirm it arrived.
Please tell me who is reading it.
Please tell me how the Bar handles a complaint about its own.
I paid for access to a process the Bar still has not made accessible. The Bar still owes me the answers.
Respectfully,
[redacted]
What this shows: The complainant filed a grievance against the ADA Coordinator as a self-generated document, using the alternate submission route the Bar had said he could use, and asked the Bar to confirm receipt, provide a complaint number and reviewer, and identify a conflict-screened route for a grievance about a Bar official.
What this does not show: This email does not contain any Bar response; it is the complainant’s own transmittal and request for written confirmation.