Disability Discrimination & Reasonable Accommodation
Employees with disabilities have a unique set of legal rights. The law prohibits employers from refusing to hire a qualified individual with a disability because of that individual's disability. Individuals with disabilities are also protected from harassment based on their disability and from disparate treatment relative to non-disabled employees in the workplace.
In many cases, the law may require an employer to provide a "reasonable accommodation" enabling a disabled employee to do their job duties. The law broadly defines a person with a disability as someone with a physical or mental impairment that substantially affects their ability to do their job, or a person with a record or a history of an impairment that is known to the employer. In such cases, the law may require an employer to treat a disabled employee differently from other employees, by removing or eliminating barriers to the employee's ability to perform their job. Some examples of reasonable accommodation include job modifications to remove or reassign job duties that are not essential to the position, changes in an employee's work schedule, telecommuting, changes in supervisory methods, or assistive technologies such as voice activated computer software for visually impaired employees. The appropriate accommodations will vary in each case according to the nature of the employee's disability and the specifics of their job duties, as well as the size of the employer. Reasonable accommodation cases are very fact intensive and complex and require careful attention to detail. At our firm we are passionate about representing disabled employees with tenacity, skill and a creative, problem-solving approach.
Our firm is proud of our longstanding commitment to shaping disability law. We litigated the precedent setting case of Gambini v. Total Renal Care Inc., 486 F.3d 1087 (9th Cir. 2007), including an appeal to Ninth Circuit Court. The Ninth Circuit reversed the jury verdict in favor of the employer and held that an employer cannot summarily fire a disabled employee for conduct that the employer knows is caused by the employee's disability, including mental or psychiatric disabilities.