(FORTUNE Magazine) – A year ago, when we last gaped incredulously at the Americans With Disabilities Act, it was just beginning to take effect for companies with 25 or more workers, and nobody knew exactly what it meant. Well, nobody except the lawyers. What they instantly osmosed is that this arguably well- intentioned law would be a gravy train in 1992-93 and an even bigger bonanza in 1994 (when the cutoff goes down to 15 workers). For anybody in the litigation industry, the act's most marvelous feature is its combination of (a) massive uncertainty as to what is required and (b) potentially massive damages for noncompliance. The past year's record features an avalanche of litigation based on the interaction of (a) and (b). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says ADA complaints are its biggest growth engine (it had over 6,000 complaints in the first six months of fiscal 1993). Not only employers are at risk, of course. The act also bars discrimination against disabled individuals in education and in access to public facilities. Among the issues that judges and juries have been sorting out, Solomonically or otherwise: -- If an adult coach of a Little League team requires a wheelchair, can he position himself at third base? Little League rules said no, because a kid rounding third might run into the wheelchair. But a paraplegic coach in Arizona challenged the rule in federal district court and won his case against Little League Baseball Inc., which, for the moment, has elected to sullenly acquiesce and not appeal. -- When low-income individuals have disabling handicaps and cannot care for themselves at home, does ADA require that Medicaid pay the cost of home care for them? The issue is not resolved, but some activists calling themselves Adapt (the American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) say the answer is yes, and recently got HHS Secretary Donna Shalala to hear their case. -- Does the new law require volunteer fire departments to accept deaf volunteers? The answer is not yet entirely clear, and the Prince Georges County (Maryland) Fire Department has still not ruled on the application of a deaf woman; however, it has apologized for its failure to provide her with a sign-language interpreter at one of the interviews. -- Do state and local laws against ''bias crimes'' -- laws that provide $ special penalties for assaults and other crimes motivated by animus toward members of a group -- cover bias against disabled individuals? New York City is the only jurisdiction we know about that has thus far answered the question affirmatively. -- What sort of accommodations for folks in wheelchairs are required in public stadiums? Designers of the new Georgia Dome Stadium in Atlanta have been wrestling with the question and satisfying nobody. Their basic dilemma: It can be dangerous and impractical to put the guy in the wheelchair in a zone up high in the stadium, but if the special zone is down low, then he can't see when the crowd stands up -- unless he gets box seats on the field, i.e., the best seats in the house. The U.S. Department of Justice is now investigating numerous complaints against the stadium. -- What postures must companies adopt toward employees with disastrous illnesses? One large answer to this question was vouchsafed recently in a federal trial in U.S. district court in Chicago. A company called AIC Investigations had long employed a cancer-stricken executive named Charles Wessel. Last year the cancer spread to his brain, his doctor gave him six months to a year to live, his employer judged him to be failing -- and also told him he had to retire (with no loss of medical benefits). The EEOC brought an ADA suit on Wessel's behalf, and because of his truncated life expectancy, the courts expedited the trial. Several weeks ago a jury found that he could have continued to function on the job and awarded him $572,000. (A) and (b) are not the only reasons for expecting the new law to go on generating lawsuits. Another reason is the emergence of a ''disability rights movement'' that increasingly gravitates to confrontational postures. The movement is described sympathetically in the recently published No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, by Joseph P. Shapiro, which mentions an astonishing detail. It seems that a publication called The Disability Rag surveyed its readers to see which term they most preferred in characterizing themselves: disabled, handicapped, or what? The survey established that the big vogue term nowadays is, of all things, ''crippled'' -- long understood to be the ultimate in offensiveness. As with some militant gays who insist on defining themselves as ''queer,'' you rather get the sense that the disability movement includes a certain number of folks looking to make you feel baffled and uncomfortable. ADA will give them lots of opportunities.