Employers ought to consider the process of how they interact with their disabled employees. As Fisher Phillips’ Devin Rauchwerger writes, good-faith exchanges and an open description of the job’s essential functions can go a long way toward decreasing employers’ risk of liability from disability discrimination lawsuits.
Understanding how to properly engage in the interactive process with a disabled employee will substantially reduce your company’s risk associated with disability discrimination lawsuits. Unfortunately, plaintiffs’ counsel love disability discrimination cases for several reasons. Opposing counsel can often point to a specific time when the employment relationship changed after the person either became disabled or revealed their disability to the employer. This is different than a race or gender discrimination case where the employer has knowledge of the employee’s protected category from the beginning.
It is difficult to argue that an employer hired a person of a specific race and then terminated them because of that same characteristic. It is easier to convince a jury that an employer terminated someone because they suddenly became difficult to deal with due to their disability. Furthermore, there is typically little dispute over whether the employee’s condition qualifies as a…
