What Happened When I Requested ADA Access to the State Bar of Georgia Grievance Process?

I am a disabled dad. I use adaptive technology instead of typing due to my disability. I suffer from 2 rare autoimmune diseases.

I filed a complaint against a contract attorney with the City of Brookhaven, since they refused to discuss the situation by email, in person, or on the phone, despite repeated attempts to solve this with a 5 minute chat.

My grievance passed the State Bar’s first round of review. The Bar then asked me to answer the lawyer’s response and send any additional evidence I wanted considered.

I sent them two emails with exactly what they asked for.

Their own system sent me two confirmation receipts, both shown in how the grievance began.

About two months later, I received a letter from the State Bar of Georgia dismissing my complaint.

That is when the wheels started to fall off.

Then Deputy General Counsel Andreea N. Morrison, in the office that decides whether every lawyer in Georgia is honest enough to keep practicing, dismissed my complaint with these words:

The Bar dismissed my complaint because it said I never responded. That was simply not true.

So I overnighted them the proof that they were wrong. At substantial cost.

When I proved the documents had actually been sent and received by them, contrary to their dismissal letter, the Bar admitted it in writing:

Then it blamed the way I labeled the email I sent them. Apparently the grievance number the Bar itself had assigned it, and the name of the attorney the complaint was about, were not enough.

Think about that.

They received the evidence. They left it out of the file.
I found the receipts.
I rebuilt the record.
I paid to fix their mistake.
And somehow, I was still treated like the problem.

In the Bar’s own email, the blame came first. The apology came five paragraphs later, one sentence long: “I apologize for the oversight.” The sentence correcting the dismissal never came at all. The explanation still makes zero sense to me. I have asked more than ten times what actually happened. I still do not have a real answer.

That is not customer service.
That is not accountability.
And it is certainly not the standard this office demands from every lawyer in Georgia.

So, only after all of this, and after the Bar could not manage even Comcast-level customer service, I asked for an ADA accommodation: a single point of contact, and written communication I could use with my adaptive technology.

The Bar did not give me the written process or single point of contact I asked for. A simple request that would have cost them nothing, and one they should have offered on customer-service grounds alone, for losing my complaint.

I was not looking for special treatment.
Not a favor.
Not a different result.

I would not have needed to ask at all if the Bar had not, in its own word, “misclassified” my submissions. A word it used but never explained, because it would never tell me what was in my own file.

This was just the beginning of the moving goalposts, the refusal to fix their error, and an ever-changing position on the ADA.

It got so bad I had to reach out and file a complaint with the ADA office of Georgia.

Only after that office consulted with, and in effect schooled, the Bar on its own ADA obligations did anything change. Read it for yourself here.

It granted my ADA accommodations in writing, with their office on the email.

The very next line in this story is dated the day before. The Bar’s own Deputy General Counsel had already put the opposite in writing.

One day apart.

Not a public entity. Yet the Supreme Court of Georgia authorizes the State Bar to bring disciplinary proceedings, and this office investigates and prosecutes them.

The same day, it questioned whether I needed help at all.

Then it questioned why I was asking.

It even told me it did not have to publish a way to ask for help.

Then it removed the State ADA office from its emails to me, despite my asking it not to. Weeks later, the same official who had approved my accommodation set out the Bar’s final position.

In the same email, the Bar said any such obligation would arise under Title III rather than Title II.

The Georgia Bar was trying to make me litigate rights that were settled before the Atlanta Olympics.

The State Bar wrote every quoted line above. Every quote links to the original document.

They sent the emails.
They wrote the story.