The Remote Accommodation Termination

Question 2: The Remote Accommodation Termination

Your role

You represent Corvid Logistics after a former senior pricing analyst, Dana Whitfield, files an agency charge alleging disability discrimination and retaliation and demands $450,000. Leadership wants to know whether to fight, reinstate with an accommodation, or settle.

Governing law

1. An employer must provide a reasonable accommodation to a qualified individual with a disability unless the accommodation imposes undue hardship.

2. A qualified individual can perform the essential functions of the position with or without accommodation. Essential functions are determined from the employer's judgment, written job descriptions, the actual experience of people in the job, and the consequences of not requiring the function. A written description is evidence, not a conclusion.

3. Regular onsite attendance may be an essential function, but it is not essential merely because the employer says so. Successful past performance of the same duties remotely is relevant evidence that physical presence is not essential.

4. A failure to engage in the interactive process is not independently actionable. The employee must also show that a reasonable accommodation existed that the process would have identified.

5. Undue hardship means significant difficulty or expense in light of the employer's size and resources. Generalized concerns about morale, precedent, or fairness to other employees do not establish undue hardship.

6. An employer that honestly believes its stated reason for termination is not liable merely because the belief was mistaken. Honest belief may be negated by evidence the stated reason was not the actual reason.

7. An employee who takes statutorily protected medical leave may not be counted absent, disciplined, or terminated for protected absences. Interference does not require hostility, only denial or discouragement of a protected right.

8. Retaliation requires that protected activity was a but-for cause of the adverse action. Temporal proximity may support causation but may be rebutted by a substantial intervening event.

9. Pretext may be shown by shifting explanations, departures from ordinary procedure, comparator evidence, or statements revealing the true motive.

10. Compensatory and punitive damages are capped at $300,000 for employers of this size. Back pay, front pay, and attorney fees are not subject to the cap.

Facts

Dana worked at Corvid for five years. For the final two years she worked fully remotely under a company-wide pandemic-era policy, receiving ratings of "exceeds expectations" both years. Her role involved building pricing models, attending internal reviews, and joining customer calls.

Corvid adopted a return-to-office policy requiring four days onsite. Dana has an autoimmune condition documented by her rheumatologist. She requested three remote days per week and a flexible start time on flare days, submitting medical certification.

Human resources took six weeks to respond, then offered only a reserved parking space and a later start time. HR's file contains no analysis of the telework request. During those six weeks, Dana's manager, Paul, texted a colleague:

"If she can't badge in like everyone else, we finally have our out."

Dana began taking approved intermittent medical leave for flare days. In the following month, Corvid marked two of her absences "no call, no show." On both days Dana had emailed Paul's personal address, which he had told the team to use "for anything urgent." Paul told HR he "never got anything."

The written job description does not mention onsite presence. Dana's nine-person team includes two analysts in the same role, reporting to a different manager, who work remotely three days per week. Corvid's stated reason for requiring Dana onsite is "daily customer-facing collaboration." Calendar records show Dana averaged three customer meetings per quarter, two of them virtual.

Corvid terminated Dana for "attendance abandonment," citing the two "no call, no show" days. The termination letter did not mention performance. In its agency position statement, Corvid instead described "longstanding collaboration deficiencies," which appear in no prior review.

Corvid has 800 employees. Dana's salary was $128,000. She has been unemployed for five months and has documentation of treatment for anxiety following the termination.

Assignment

Analyze:

• Whether Dana is a qualified individual and whether onsite presence four days per week is an essential function of her role.
• Whether her requested accommodation was reasonable and whether Corvid can prove undue hardship.
• The legal significance of the six-week delay and the parking-space counteroffer under the interactive-process rule.
• Whether counting protected-leave days as "no call, no show" supports interference or retaliation liability.
• The effect of Paul's text message and personal-email instruction.
• Honest belief versus pretext, including the shift from "abandonment" to "collaboration deficiencies."
• The comparator evidence from the two remote analysts.
• Corvid's realistic damages exposure, applying the statutory cap correctly.
• Whether Corvid should contest the charge, offer reinstatement with the accommodation, or settle, and in what range.
• Corrective changes to Corvid's accommodation process that do not create admissions.

Q2 key (Accommodation Termination)

1. Dana is qualified; two years of "exceeds" performance while fully remote defeats the claim that four-day onsite presence is essential, reinforced by the silent job description, the two remote comparators, and the three-meetings-per-quarter record. Missed: the defense is built on an essential-function theory that will not hold.
2. The parking-space offer is not a reasonable accommodation responsive to the request; the six-week silence matters only through supplied rule 4, and a reasonable accommodation plainly existed, so the process failure is actionable in effect. Missed: false comfort from the interactive-process rule.
3. Counting protected-leave days as "no call, no show" is interference and, given the personal-email instruction, likely pretext evidence; the stated termination ground collapses. Missed: client contests a charge whose central fact is indefensible.
4. Paul's "we finally have our out" text plus the position-statement shift from "abandonment" to "collaboration deficiencies" is a shifting-explanations pretext record. Missed: exposure assessment ignores the worst documents.
5. Undue hardship cannot be shown on this record; morale and precedent are excluded by supplied rule 5. Missed: dead-end defense consumes the strategy.
6. Damages: cap applies only to compensatory and punitive ($300,000); back pay (about $53,000 and running), front pay, and fees sit outside it. Total realistic exposure well above the cap figure. Missed: settlement authority set to the wrong ceiling.
7. Posture: settle, or reinstate with the accommodation plus make-whole pay; do not litigate the merits. A defensible settlement range brackets the $450,000 demand rather than dismissing it. Missed: client fights a losing record into a fee-shifted judgment.
8. Remediation: written accommodation-request tracking with deadlines, telework analysis on the merits, and leave-absence coding controls, framed prospectively. Missed: repeat exposure.