EMAIL RECEIVED · 2026-05-29
⚑ Bar DENIES Title II; pivots to Title III
Read the text transcript
I have carefully reviewed your email. At this point, however, your correspondence does not appear to present a request for a specific reasonable accommodation under the ADA that requires further discussion of the interactive process. Your email primarily includes legal arguments, requests for institutional legal positions, requests for admissions, explanations of litigation-related issues, and assertions about potential or anticipated legal claims against the State Bar and its personnel.
You expressly stated in an earlier email that you are pursuing litigation in federal court concerning these matters. Under these circumstances, the State Bar absolutely will not engage in litigation-oriented questioning, legal debate, or adversarial email correspondence concerning statutory interpretation, legal theories, institutional liability, or anticipated claims.
The State Bar has already addressed your accessibility-related requests, including written-only communication and handling of accessible formats. The Bar remains willing to honor any reasonable accommodation relating to access to the grievance process itself. If you contend that you require an additional accommodation to access or participate in that process, you may submit a clear request to me identifying the specific accommodation sought and the access-related issue involved.
To be clear, the State Bar’s position remains that it is not subject to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The State Bar has previously explained that it is a private, member-funded organization that serves as an administrative arm of the Supreme Court of Georgia, at the pleasure of the Court. The Bar does not concede the applicability of Title II to the matters you describe. To the extent that it has ADA obligations, the State Bar’s position is that such obligations would arise under Title III rather than Title II.
Because your correspondence largely seeks legal conclusions and responses concerning issues you have indicated will become the subject of litigation, you must direct all those questions to Deputy General Counsel Bill NeSmith.
I hope your post-surgery recovery is going well.
Thank you.
From: ██████ ███████ <██████████████>
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 9:24 AM
To: John Shiptenko <██████████████>
Subject: [External] RE: Grievance No. ██████-█████ — One Question: Does Title II Apply, Yes or No
Mr. Shiptenko,
Thank you for helping obtain confirmation from Ms. Nash on Friday that the Bar now has the documents I submitted and that the file has been updated. I appreciate that you have tried to answer some of my questions. I want to start there, because I am trying to be fair about what has been helpful.
Candidly, this entire event has taken a lot out of me. My own health, ███████’s serious health issues, and the time required to keep reconstructing and re-explaining the same access problems have become a real burden. I use assistive technology and the limited hours when my health allows me to write clearly. That costs money, focus, and the few good hours I have.
I want to be clear about the money issue.
I understand that ordinary correspondence is my responsibility. I use assistive software and accessibility tools because of my disability, and I understand that those are part of how I communicate.
But I should not have had to spend money, software time, and my limited good health hours to identify the Bar’s dismissal mistake, prove the Bar received what it treated as missing, re-send materials, chase file placement, ask repeatedly whether the documents were in the right file, and wait until Ms. Nash finally confirmed the file was complete — which came only after a third written request, and after you helped obtain that confirmation from her.
That was not ordinary correspondence. That was institutional correction work caused by the Bar’s admitted file-placement failure. The cost of that work was shifted to me — the disabled complainant who had already asked for accommodation.
I also remain upset about how the Bar first explained the missing-submission problem. Instead of correcting its own failure to file what it had received, the first explanation framed the issue around the fact that my messages were labeled as a “Supplemental Submission in Support of Grievance” — as if my wording caused the problem. The Bar invited written submissions, accepted them through its own process, acknowledged them, and later admitted they were not added to the file. It then treated all of that as an “oversight.” But an apology for an oversight is not the same thing as identifying what failed, correcting the record, and taking the blame off the disabled person who used the Bar’s own written process exactly as invited. I raised that concern. No one has corrected it.
I also need to raise how some of these responses have reached me, because it goes to transparency and to who I am actually dealing with. Earlier in this matter, Ms. Burgess’s signed response framed the missing-submission problem around how I had labeled my materials, rather than correcting the Bar’s own failure to file them. More recently, I received a separate institutional response that was unsigned — no name, just the Office. I have preserved the header information for that response. The preserved headers appear to connect the unsigned response to the same Exchange mailbox associated with Ms. Burgess’s signed May 5 response, while signed emails from Mr. NeSmith and from you appear to originate from different Exchange mailboxes. If that inference is wrong, please correct it in writing. That unsigned response again questioned a concern I had raised through assistive technology, including my question about whether a Bar email address was active, and suggested I may have been misled by an internet search or an AI-generated summary.
If the Bar is going to suggest that a disabled person’s concern is imagined or software-generated, the person making that suggestion should put their name on it. So I am asking plainly: who wrote and approved that unsigned response? I am asking because I have grievances pending against Bar personnel, and the answer matters. Without a name, someone whose conduct I have already questioned could keep responding to me anonymously, and I would have no way to know it or to raise the conflict. I am entitled to know who at the Bar is speaking when the Bar speaks to me.
This did not begin because I wanted to fight the Bar. It began because the Bar dismissed my grievance on a record that did not include my received submissions. Then, when I tried to protect my access rights so it would not happen again, I was told I did not appear to need accommodation, that the Bar was not bound by Title II, and that my ADA request appeared aimed at a substantive outcome.
The handling made that worse. A meeting was offered. I prepared for it and reorganized around ███████’s medical appointment. It was then canceled because Mr. NeSmith said he had not had time to digest my response. He had also told me he had a 2:00 p.m. doctor’s appointment that day, so the importance of medical scheduling was not abstract. Instead of a rescheduled access discussion, I received a letter denying the Title II framework, denying the need for accommodation, and characterizing my ADA invocation as outcome-driven. That was the moment I filed my complaint. It made me feel my access request was being treated as a problem to be managed rather than a disabled person trying to fix a mistake the Bar admitted it made.
So I am asking plainly, one time, and I am done arguing around the edges of it:
Does the State Bar of Georgia agree that Title II of the ADA applies to access to its attorney-grievance process? Yes or no.
I am not going to litigate this with you by email. I am not going to keep explaining it, and I am not going to keep arguing question by question over whether each access problem I raise is or is not an ADA issue.
Nothing in this email withdraws, narrows, or waives any accommodation request, grievance, complaint, preservation request, or access issue I have already raised. I am asking this threshold question because the Bar’s answer determines whether internal resolution is possible.
These are rights the federal government settled decades ago. I should not have to spend my health, my money, and what limited capacity I have convincing the State Bar that disabled people are entitled to access in a grievance process. So I am not going to keep doing that.
The Bar’s written positions do not fit together. If I have misstated any of the Bar’s positions below, please correct the record in writing.
Otherwise, these are the positions I am trying to reconcile:
1. Mr. NeSmith stated the State Bar is “not a public entity, such as a federal, state or local government department or agency.”
2. Mr. NeSmith stated the State Bar receives no federal, state, or local governmental funding.
3. Mr. NeSmith described the Bar as “a private, member-funded, and member-governed organization,” while also describing it as “an administrative arm of the Supreme Court of Georgia.”
4. Mr. NeSmith stated the Bar is “not required to have a published ADA Coordinator.”
5. Mr. NeSmith stated it “does not appear that you require assistance in preparing written submissions or otherwise accessing the grievance or reconsideration process.”
6. Mr. NeSmith stated my invocation of the ADA process “may be directed less toward obtaining accommodation or access assistance and more toward securing a particular substantive outcome.”
7. Mr. NeSmith stated that if grievance counsel misfiled a submission and later corrected it administratively, “there is no further remedial action required.”
8. You granted written-only communication because of my disability.
9. You granted accessible-format handling.
10. You stated the Bar wants to ensure that I have the same rights and opportunities as non-disabled grievants.
11. You stated your duty as ADA Coordinator is to ensure the Bar does not discriminate against me because of my disability.
12. You stated you have a duty to ensure the Bar provides accommodations that let me effectively access and participate in the grievance process.
13. You stated the Bar has more than one ADA Coordinator depending on the program, service, or activity.
14. You stated Ms. Nash usually handles ADA requests for the grievance process, and that you were serving as my coordinator because she was handling reconsideration.
15. You invited ADA accommodation requests for multiple pending grievance-related matters to be sent to you.
16. You acknowledged my non-CAPTCHA access complaint and stated the Bar engages in the interactive process to identify an effective alternative.
17. You acknowledged my concerns about the differences between the Spanish and English grievance materials.
1. The Georgia State ADA Coordinator’s Office treated this as an ADA/access matter and engaged the Bar on that basis
Those cannot all be the Bar’s stable institutional position at the same time. If Title II does not apply, my access questions will keep being treated as ordinary grievance questions — even though I am raising them as access, communication, routing, receipt-confirmation, CAPTCHA, and accommodation issues. If Title II does apply, those same questions have to be answered within that framework. That is why we keep talking past each other.
I am not trying to litigate case law by email, and I am not trying to read the law to the Bar. I am telling you that my research, the Georgia State ADA Coordinator’s Office’s handling of this, DOJ Title II materials, professional-licensing guidance, and peer-bar materials all point the same way: access to a state-authorized attorney-grievance process is not categorically outside Title II.
If the answer is yes, then please say so plainly. If the Bar agrees that Title II applies, then the pending access questions should be handled as Title II access questions, not as ordinary grievance merits questions and not as an attempt to obtain a disciplinary outcome. If that is the Bar’s position, then we have something to work with, and I will continue working in good faith.
If the answer is no, then please say so plainly. If the Bar’s position is that Title II does not apply to access to its attorney-grievance process, then internal resolution of this threshold issue will not work. I will stop trying to resolve that issue through internal correspondence and take the question to a forum that can decide whether Title II applies, what the Bar’s conduct has cost me, and whether disabled people have been denied access to this process on the basis of their disability — whether this is an individual failure or a broader one affecting people who could not keep fighting through it.
That is not a threat. It is the practical consequence of the Bar’s position. A yes means we work this out within the law that applies. A no means we don’t, and I take it from there.
Please answer this threshold question in writing by Friday, May 29, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. After everything that has happened, I think I have earned a straight answer to a straight question.
Respectfully,
██████ ███████
██████████████, ██████████████
██████████████ | ██████████████<mailto:██████████████>
________________________________
Qualified individual with a disability; SSA-determined disabled and receiving SSDI; documented upper-extremity and cognitive limitations. Supporting documentation is available upon written request and execution of a properly limited HIPAA-compliant authorization.
Accessibility notice: Due to my documented disability, including limited or no functional use of my dominant hand, I use assistive technology and voice-to-text tools to produce written communications. I sincerely appreciate your understanding of this accommodation. If any portion of this correspondence contains a typographical error or is unclear as a result, please do not hesitate to ask and I will gladly clarify. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
You expressly stated in an earlier email that you are pursuing litigation in federal court concerning these matters. Under these circumstances, the State Bar absolutely will not engage in litigation-oriented questioning, legal debate, or adversarial email correspondence concerning statutory interpretation, legal theories, institutional liability, or anticipated claims.
The State Bar has already addressed your accessibility-related requests, including written-only communication and handling of accessible formats. The Bar remains willing to honor any reasonable accommodation relating to access to the grievance process itself. If you contend that you require an additional accommodation to access or participate in that process, you may submit a clear request to me identifying the specific accommodation sought and the access-related issue involved.
To be clear, the State Bar’s position remains that it is not subject to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The State Bar has previously explained that it is a private, member-funded organization that serves as an administrative arm of the Supreme Court of Georgia, at the pleasure of the Court. The Bar does not concede the applicability of Title II to the matters you describe. To the extent that it has ADA obligations, the State Bar’s position is that such obligations would arise under Title III rather than Title II.
Because your correspondence largely seeks legal conclusions and responses concerning issues you have indicated will become the subject of litigation, you must direct all those questions to Deputy General Counsel Bill NeSmith.
I hope your post-surgery recovery is going well.
Thank you.
From: ██████ ███████ <██████████████>
Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 9:24 AM
To: John Shiptenko <██████████████>
Subject: [External] RE: Grievance No. ██████-█████ — One Question: Does Title II Apply, Yes or No
Mr. Shiptenko,
Thank you for helping obtain confirmation from Ms. Nash on Friday that the Bar now has the documents I submitted and that the file has been updated. I appreciate that you have tried to answer some of my questions. I want to start there, because I am trying to be fair about what has been helpful.
Candidly, this entire event has taken a lot out of me. My own health, ███████’s serious health issues, and the time required to keep reconstructing and re-explaining the same access problems have become a real burden. I use assistive technology and the limited hours when my health allows me to write clearly. That costs money, focus, and the few good hours I have.
I want to be clear about the money issue.
I understand that ordinary correspondence is my responsibility. I use assistive software and accessibility tools because of my disability, and I understand that those are part of how I communicate.
But I should not have had to spend money, software time, and my limited good health hours to identify the Bar’s dismissal mistake, prove the Bar received what it treated as missing, re-send materials, chase file placement, ask repeatedly whether the documents were in the right file, and wait until Ms. Nash finally confirmed the file was complete — which came only after a third written request, and after you helped obtain that confirmation from her.
That was not ordinary correspondence. That was institutional correction work caused by the Bar’s admitted file-placement failure. The cost of that work was shifted to me — the disabled complainant who had already asked for accommodation.
I also remain upset about how the Bar first explained the missing-submission problem. Instead of correcting its own failure to file what it had received, the first explanation framed the issue around the fact that my messages were labeled as a “Supplemental Submission in Support of Grievance” — as if my wording caused the problem. The Bar invited written submissions, accepted them through its own process, acknowledged them, and later admitted they were not added to the file. It then treated all of that as an “oversight.” But an apology for an oversight is not the same thing as identifying what failed, correcting the record, and taking the blame off the disabled person who used the Bar’s own written process exactly as invited. I raised that concern. No one has corrected it.
I also need to raise how some of these responses have reached me, because it goes to transparency and to who I am actually dealing with. Earlier in this matter, Ms. Burgess’s signed response framed the missing-submission problem around how I had labeled my materials, rather than correcting the Bar’s own failure to file them. More recently, I received a separate institutional response that was unsigned — no name, just the Office. I have preserved the header information for that response. The preserved headers appear to connect the unsigned response to the same Exchange mailbox associated with Ms. Burgess’s signed May 5 response, while signed emails from Mr. NeSmith and from you appear to originate from different Exchange mailboxes. If that inference is wrong, please correct it in writing. That unsigned response again questioned a concern I had raised through assistive technology, including my question about whether a Bar email address was active, and suggested I may have been misled by an internet search or an AI-generated summary.
If the Bar is going to suggest that a disabled person’s concern is imagined or software-generated, the person making that suggestion should put their name on it. So I am asking plainly: who wrote and approved that unsigned response? I am asking because I have grievances pending against Bar personnel, and the answer matters. Without a name, someone whose conduct I have already questioned could keep responding to me anonymously, and I would have no way to know it or to raise the conflict. I am entitled to know who at the Bar is speaking when the Bar speaks to me.
This did not begin because I wanted to fight the Bar. It began because the Bar dismissed my grievance on a record that did not include my received submissions. Then, when I tried to protect my access rights so it would not happen again, I was told I did not appear to need accommodation, that the Bar was not bound by Title II, and that my ADA request appeared aimed at a substantive outcome.
The handling made that worse. A meeting was offered. I prepared for it and reorganized around ███████’s medical appointment. It was then canceled because Mr. NeSmith said he had not had time to digest my response. He had also told me he had a 2:00 p.m. doctor’s appointment that day, so the importance of medical scheduling was not abstract. Instead of a rescheduled access discussion, I received a letter denying the Title II framework, denying the need for accommodation, and characterizing my ADA invocation as outcome-driven. That was the moment I filed my complaint. It made me feel my access request was being treated as a problem to be managed rather than a disabled person trying to fix a mistake the Bar admitted it made.
So I am asking plainly, one time, and I am done arguing around the edges of it:
Does the State Bar of Georgia agree that Title II of the ADA applies to access to its attorney-grievance process? Yes or no.
I am not going to litigate this with you by email. I am not going to keep explaining it, and I am not going to keep arguing question by question over whether each access problem I raise is or is not an ADA issue.
Nothing in this email withdraws, narrows, or waives any accommodation request, grievance, complaint, preservation request, or access issue I have already raised. I am asking this threshold question because the Bar’s answer determines whether internal resolution is possible.
These are rights the federal government settled decades ago. I should not have to spend my health, my money, and what limited capacity I have convincing the State Bar that disabled people are entitled to access in a grievance process. So I am not going to keep doing that.
The Bar’s written positions do not fit together. If I have misstated any of the Bar’s positions below, please correct the record in writing.
Otherwise, these are the positions I am trying to reconcile:
1. Mr. NeSmith stated the State Bar is “not a public entity, such as a federal, state or local government department or agency.”
2. Mr. NeSmith stated the State Bar receives no federal, state, or local governmental funding.
3. Mr. NeSmith described the Bar as “a private, member-funded, and member-governed organization,” while also describing it as “an administrative arm of the Supreme Court of Georgia.”
4. Mr. NeSmith stated the Bar is “not required to have a published ADA Coordinator.”
5. Mr. NeSmith stated it “does not appear that you require assistance in preparing written submissions or otherwise accessing the grievance or reconsideration process.”
6. Mr. NeSmith stated my invocation of the ADA process “may be directed less toward obtaining accommodation or access assistance and more toward securing a particular substantive outcome.”
7. Mr. NeSmith stated that if grievance counsel misfiled a submission and later corrected it administratively, “there is no further remedial action required.”
8. You granted written-only communication because of my disability.
9. You granted accessible-format handling.
10. You stated the Bar wants to ensure that I have the same rights and opportunities as non-disabled grievants.
11. You stated your duty as ADA Coordinator is to ensure the Bar does not discriminate against me because of my disability.
12. You stated you have a duty to ensure the Bar provides accommodations that let me effectively access and participate in the grievance process.
13. You stated the Bar has more than one ADA Coordinator depending on the program, service, or activity.
14. You stated Ms. Nash usually handles ADA requests for the grievance process, and that you were serving as my coordinator because she was handling reconsideration.
15. You invited ADA accommodation requests for multiple pending grievance-related matters to be sent to you.
16. You acknowledged my non-CAPTCHA access complaint and stated the Bar engages in the interactive process to identify an effective alternative.
17. You acknowledged my concerns about the differences between the Spanish and English grievance materials.
1. The Georgia State ADA Coordinator’s Office treated this as an ADA/access matter and engaged the Bar on that basis
Those cannot all be the Bar’s stable institutional position at the same time. If Title II does not apply, my access questions will keep being treated as ordinary grievance questions — even though I am raising them as access, communication, routing, receipt-confirmation, CAPTCHA, and accommodation issues. If Title II does apply, those same questions have to be answered within that framework. That is why we keep talking past each other.
I am not trying to litigate case law by email, and I am not trying to read the law to the Bar. I am telling you that my research, the Georgia State ADA Coordinator’s Office’s handling of this, DOJ Title II materials, professional-licensing guidance, and peer-bar materials all point the same way: access to a state-authorized attorney-grievance process is not categorically outside Title II.
If the answer is yes, then please say so plainly. If the Bar agrees that Title II applies, then the pending access questions should be handled as Title II access questions, not as ordinary grievance merits questions and not as an attempt to obtain a disciplinary outcome. If that is the Bar’s position, then we have something to work with, and I will continue working in good faith.
If the answer is no, then please say so plainly. If the Bar’s position is that Title II does not apply to access to its attorney-grievance process, then internal resolution of this threshold issue will not work. I will stop trying to resolve that issue through internal correspondence and take the question to a forum that can decide whether Title II applies, what the Bar’s conduct has cost me, and whether disabled people have been denied access to this process on the basis of their disability — whether this is an individual failure or a broader one affecting people who could not keep fighting through it.
That is not a threat. It is the practical consequence of the Bar’s position. A yes means we work this out within the law that applies. A no means we don’t, and I take it from there.
Please answer this threshold question in writing by Friday, May 29, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. After everything that has happened, I think I have earned a straight answer to a straight question.
Respectfully,
██████ ███████
██████████████, ██████████████
██████████████ | ██████████████<mailto:██████████████>
________________________________
Qualified individual with a disability; SSA-determined disabled and receiving SSDI; documented upper-extremity and cognitive limitations. Supporting documentation is available upon written request and execution of a properly limited HIPAA-compliant authorization.
Accessibility notice: Due to my documented disability, including limited or no functional use of my dominant hand, I use assistive technology and voice-to-text tools to produce written communications. I sincerely appreciate your understanding of this accommodation. If any portion of this correspondence contains a typographical error or is unclear as a result, please do not hesitate to ask and I will gladly clarify. Thank you for your patience and understanding.