Georgia ADA Records: What Happened

Cold open

State Bar of Georgia: Leigh Burgess Admitted the Rebuttal Was Received

The State Bar of Georgia asked me to send a written rebuttal. I sent two. Its own system confirmed both were received.

Then the dismissal arrived.

It said no rebuttal had been received.

I stared at the letter, then at the receipts. The Bar had asked for the documents. I had sent them. Its system had confirmed them. Somehow, when the decision was made, they were not in the file.

So I did what anyone would do. I sent the proof and asked the Bar to fix the record.

That should have ended the story.

Instead, it started it.

Leigh Burgess sent the admission. The Bar acknowledged that both submissions had been received and left out of the grievance file. But the dismissal still said no rebuttal had been received.

I kept asking a basic question: would the Bar correct its own written record?

The answer never came in a clean, simple sentence.

Episode one

State Bar ADA Access: William D. NeSmith III and John J. Shiptenko

I am a disabled dad. I use adaptive technology because typing is physically difficult.

But I did not begin with the ADA. I did not begin with legal language. I did not ask for special treatment.

I began by asking each institution to fix the ordinary problem in front of it.

Only after the ordinary route failed did I explain what I needed because of my disability.

Deputy General Counsel William D. NeSmith III questioned whether I required help and whether my ADA request was really about access. The next day, John J. Shiptenko approved accommodations in writing. Shiptenko later stated that the Bar’s position remained that it was not subject to Title II.

That distinction matters.

The access requests did not create the confusion. They came after the missing records, unanswered questions, and changing explanations.

Access came second. It always came second.

The hidden door

The State Bar ADA Complaint Form Nobody Told Me About

I kept asking the State Bar for a written route a disabled person could use.

No one sent me to one.

So I searched for it myself.

That is how I found the Bar’s Spanish-language grievance form. It told a person with a disability to contact the ADA Coordinator for help with the complaint process.

The English form did not.

Same institution. Same grievance system. One form showed disabled people a door. The other left the door out.

On May 26, John J. Shiptenko acknowledged both the non-CAPTCHA problem and the difference between the Spanish and English forms. He wrote that he hoped to respond that week.

Then the questions were sorted.

I had placed fifteen open access and process questions into one document to make them easy to answer. Shiptenko ruled that eleven of them were not related to discriminatory treatment and sent them back to William D. NeSmith III, the same Deputy General Counsel who had already cut off substantive correspondence.

I found the route they had never shown me. When I asked why the English form hid it, most of the questions were routed back out of the ADA channel.

Episode two

GIRMA, GMA, and Gallagher Bassett: Belinda Boscoe, Seven Claims, and James Westbury’s Letter

In another part of the story, I went to GIRMA and Gallagher Bassett because I wanted help resolving a problem involving the City of Brookhaven.

Within 48 hours, Gallagher Bassett generated seven claim reports. Senior Resolution Manager Belinda Boscoe later wrote that they had been “mistakenly set up as new claims.”

I asked what had been created. I asked whether these were seven separate claims or one matter divided into pieces. I asked who was responsible for disability access. I asked for one phone call so a human being could explain the process.

The March 13 request received no response.

The March 16 follow-up received no response.

More messages followed. The claim was closed without the requested ADA contact, grievance process, or phone call being provided.

Later, outside counsel James R. Westbury, Jr. described the volume and frequency of my emails as harassment.

I had asked for an explanation. I received another accusation.

Different institution. Different people. A strangely familiar ending: the process became harder to understand, and the work of untangling it came back to me.

The unexpected turn

State of Georgia ADA Coordinator’s Office: The One Office That Answered

The State of Georgia ADA Coordinator’s Office did something different.

The office is led by State ADA Coordinator Stacey Peace.

It treated the request as a real access concern. It contacted the State Bar. It offered assistance and model materials. It answered written questions without making me prove, again and again, that I deserved an answer.

When I sent a thank-you email on May 14, the office replied nineteen minutes later.

That response did not decide the underlying dispute. It did not rule on the merits. It did something more basic.

It showed what normal communication looked like.

The comparator case

Black Attorney Marsha Mignott: Two Years Recommended. One Year Recommended. Zero Discipline.

Before anyone calls my State Bar record isolated, put another public record beside it.

Marsha W. Mignott is a Black Georgia attorney. The State Bar’s Office of the General Counsel prosecuted her under Rules 1.8(b) and 1.9(c)(2).

A Special Master recommended a two-year suspension. The State Disciplinary Review Board recommended one year.

The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously held that the rules cited against Mignott applied to clients and former clients, not prospective clients. The Court imposed no discipline and dismissed the case.

The conduct dated to 2018. The probable-cause notice came in 2020. The unanimous dismissal did not come until 2023. She spent years under a disciplinary case built on rules Georgia’s highest court said did not reach her conduct.

Mignott then filed a federal race-discrimination case. Her complaint alleges that the State Bar and its Office of the General Counsel pursued “fraudulent grievances” against Black attorneys and subjected them to “unequal grievance and disciplinary proceedings relative to their white peers.”

Those are Mignott’s allegations, not findings. The Bar denies them and has stated that race plays no role in its disciplinary matters.

But the federal case did not disappear. In July 2025, the Eleventh Circuit vacated the dismissal and sent it back to federal district court. The appellate court noted that Mignott had prevailed in the Georgia Supreme Court, which held she violated no professional-conduct rule. Her discrimination claims remain unresolved on remand.

Episode three

John Shiptenko and William NeSmith Changed the Terms Every Time I Reached the Threshold

By late May, I stopped asking broad questions.

I reduced the central issue to one word: yes or no.

Did Title II of the ADA apply to access to the State Bar of Georgia attorney-grievance process?

John J. Shiptenko did not answer yes or no. He wrote that the Bar’s position remained that it was not subject to Title II, pivoted to Title III, and said the Bar would not engage in litigation-oriented questioning.

The question had become too legal to answer only after I made it impossible to misunderstand.

The harm sat still. Only the terms, channels, roles, and thresholds moved.

Coming soon

City of Brookhaven Accessibility Record: Coming Soon

The City of Brookhaven chapter is being prepared for publication.

Visit the City of Brookhaven accessibility record page.

The central question

Georgia ADA Accommodation Requests: What I Actually Asked For

Not money. Not a shortcut. Not a guaranteed result.

I wanted to know that documents were received and placed where they belonged. I wanted written communication I could use with adaptive technology. I wanted one responsible contact. I wanted a route that did not require guessing which inbox, form, or person might work that day.

Most of all, I wanted the institutions to correct their own mistakes without making me privately rebuild the process at my own expense.

Those requests were not favors. They were the minimum needed to remain part of the process.

A law older than the institutions’ excuses

The Americans with Disabilities Act Has Been Law Since 1990

That is when I invoked the ADA. Not first. Last. Only after their own systems broke.

The ADA became federal law in 1990.

Spaghetti Junction had just opened. The Braves and Falcons played at the old Fulton County Stadium. Atlanta had not yet been awarded the Olympics. Mobile phones still looked like bricks. Google did not exist. AOL had not yet mailed America a thousand useless CDs. Germany was still two countries.

That is how long Georgia institutions have had to learn one basic thing. Disability is a federal right. The ADA says people with disabilities have the right to equal access, not whatever access an institution feels like giving.

I asked three Georgia institutions to honor a law that outlived their stadiums. Not one of them fixed the problem. Each one turned on the person asking.

I asked for equal access. They answered with accusations, harassment, and delay.

So I stopped asking and started keeping. Every email. Every dodge. Every date.

Every word that matters on this site is theirs. You do not have to believe me. You can read it here: their words, their dates, and the questions they would not answer.

Why this became public

Why ADA Matters Published the Georgia ADA Record

At first, ADA Matters was a filing cabinet.

I needed somewhere to keep hundreds of emails, letters, receipts, claim notices, and attachments in order.

Then a pattern emerged. The documents were answering questions the institutions would not. Dates contradicted explanations. Receipts contradicted dismissals. Approvals sat beside denials. The same simple requests appeared again and again.

That is when the filing cabinet became a story.

This page is the front door. The timeline, questions, and evidence pages are the receipts.

If you read only one chapter, start with the State Bar. It put both sides of the contradiction in writing.