This may seem surprising coming from a lawyer. But, if you focus solely on legal rights and obligations, you may not be taking full advantage of opportunities to lower legal risks. Knowing "what's legal" is an important step to help avoid trouble, but it does not always maximize risk reduction. Determining legal rights and lowering risk are two different goals, even though they have significant overlap. This article is a reminder to keep both in mind – especially when a person is still employed, allowing opportunity for facts to further develop before termination or a charge occurs.
Two scenarios – reasonable accommodation requests and discipline and possible termination decisions – readily illustrate some differences between risk mitigation and legal rights. Keep in mind however, the same principles can apply in plenty of other situations.
The legal analysis for reasonable accommodation has multiple steps and may require information you don't yet have – such as a treating provider confirming restrictions and ability to carry out essential job duties. In such scenarios, it is common (and appropriate) to consider whether a requested accommodation is legally required. That means establishing that the person has a disability, which prevents them from performing essential functions of the job, and that the potential reasonable accommodation is not an undue hardship.
Rather than limiting your focus to a determination of whether a particular accommodation is legally required, a...
As world leaders gathered in New York for the High-Level Week of the 81st UN General Assembly, a “breaking news” post began circulating in Sri Lanka claiming that the country had been removed from ...