"They're bottom feeders -- both of them," Rogal said of Mundy and Mehrban. "I really feel strongly about this, about these kinds of guerrilla tactics. It's shameful, especially in this day and age when people are struggling to make a living."
Rogal accuses Mehrban of singling out immigrant business owners. He vows to defeat Mundy's suit against his Iranian-born client, then sue Mehrban for malicious prosecution.
But Mehrban isn't the only attorney making his living from ADA suits. Lynn Hubbard III of Chico estimates he has filed 1,500 suits over the past decade, settling out of court 95% of the time. The Irvine law firm of Azimy-Nathan has filed at least 400 suits on behalf of six disabled clients over the past five years.
In San Francisco, attorney Thomas E. Frankovich handled many of serial litigant Jarek Molski's 400 suits before a federal judge in Los Angeles barred them from bringing more legal actions without court permission.
It was in Solvang, the faux-Danish village in the Santa Barbara wine country, that the litigious Molski met his Waterloo.
Rather than settling for $2,000 or $3,000, the owners of the Mandarin Touch restaurant -- which serves waffles by day and Chinese food to the dinner crowd -- persuaded U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie to declare the Polish-born law school graduate a "vexatious litigant" and bar him from filing more suits in the seven-county Central District of California.
Molski, who has used a wheelchair since a 1988 motorcycle accident, appealed Rafeedie's order to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court without success.
Even so, "this issue is not dead. It's coming back. There are already others stepping into his shoes," said Frankovich, who faces disciplinary action before the State Bar of California.
Frankovich, Mehrban and Hubbard say lawsuits are the only means of enforcing compliance.
"It doesn't make you a vexatious litigant just because you're doing good work for the disabled," Frankovich said.
Tom Hagerman is coming around to that way of thinking.
The Pasadena native descends gingerly from his white Dodge van, grimacing as he slowly lurches the length of the parking lot behind Shoppers Lane to show how far he has to walk from the disabled parking spaces to his weekly rendezvous at Hamburger Hamlet.
