You can’t defend what you can’t evidence.

A court only ever asks two questions about your buildings. What did you know about their accessibility? And what did you do about it?

Most leadership teams can’t answer either. Not because they don’t care — but because nobody has ever measured. There’s no baseline, no record of decisions, no evidence of progress. That gap used to be invisible. It’s now where the legal risk lives — because in every jurisdiction this series covers, the organisations losing cases aren’t the ones with imperfect buildings. They’re the ones with no evidence they ever looked.

The headline number is striking, but the detail matters more: nearly half of those cases were filed against organisations that had been sued before. A settlement without a system fixes the lawsuit, not the exposure. The claim closes, the building stays unmeasured, and the next plaintiff finds the same barriers — now with a paper trail proving the defendant knew.

That’s why “we’ll deal with it if it comes up” is the most expensive accessibility strategy in America. The second lawsuit is always harder to defend than the first.

The European Accessibility Act moved accessibility from aspiration to enforcement: courts have begun ordering major retailers to make their services accessible — with daily penalties for every day of delay — and national regimes carry maximum fines past the €1m mark. But the sharpest change is closer to home: in Ireland, serious non-compliance can now carry criminal penalties — not a line item, a court date.

The practical test for any European portfolio is simple. If a regulator calls on Tuesday, can you show your data and your plan by Friday? Not a promise to commission an audit — a live picture of every building, and evidence of what’s improving. If the answer is no, the exposure isn’t hypothetical. It’s just unscheduled.

The Equality Act 2010 gives UK building owners a duty that never switches off. There’s no badge, no audit stamp, no point at which a building is “done”. The duty to make reasonable adjustments is anticipatory and continuing — it applies before anyone complains, and it keeps applying after every fix.

And compensation for discrimination claims is uncapped. A three-year-old audit PDF doesn’t discharge a continuing duty; it documents the moment you stopped looking. A continuing duty needs a continuing record.

The US: 8,667 lawsuits in a year, nearly half against repeat defendants. Europe: maximum fines past €1m, court-ordered remediation on the clock, and criminal penalties in Ireland. The UK: a continuing duty with uncapped compensation. Different systems, different mechanisms — one conclusion.

Compliance is a moving target, and a one-off audit can’t hit it. Buildings change, regulations change, case law changes. The organisations on the right side of all three systems aren’t the ones with perfect buildings — they’re the ones who can answer the two questions: we measured, and here’s what we did next.