Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—DISABILITY—10th Cir.: Former employee with cellulitis, fired following extra leg room accommodation, gets trial, (Jul 22, 2025)

By Jason Albright, J.D.

The Tenth Circuit noted that the Reeves exception is narrow.

L3Harris Technologies, Inc. was not entitled to summary judgement against the disability discrimination and retaliation claims of a former employee who was fired within months of being granted an accommodation of extra leg room on long business flights based on his recurring cellulitis, the Tenth Circuit held. Citing Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 530 U.S. 133 (2000), the district court had concluded that the employee’s evidence did not sufficiently link his discharge to any discriminatory or retaliatory motive, but the exception in Reeves is narrow, the employee produced sufficient evidence that L3Harris’s explanation for his discharge—that he asked to be “packaged out”—was pretextual, and the facts pointed toward “a decision tainted by animus,” according to the appeals court. Judge Eid concurred (Jenny v. L3Harris Technologies, Inc., No. 24-4032 (10th Cir. July 21, 2025)).

Defense contractor. L3Harris is a defense contractor that sells technology to government and commercial customers worldwide, and the plaintiff began working for its predecessor in 1992. As of June 2019 served as Senior Director of International Business Development. He supervised a team of four or five people and reported to the Vice President. In July 2019, after the predecessor company merged with Harris Corporation to form L3Harris, the employee and his team were moved under a second VP’s supervision.

Travel for work and cellulitis. The employee traveled often for work, and his division’s policy was to book employees in coach-class seats. On one of these business trips, he contracted recurring cellulitis, a painful bacterial infection of the skin and the tissue beneath it. Cellulitis thrives on poor circulation, so extended periods in a cramped, coach-class seat could trigger debilitating flare-ups. The flare-ups caused pain and inflammation that prevented him from walking for days at a time.

Accommodation granted. To address his condition, the employee submitted a formal request for an ADA accommodation that would allow him to travel in exit-row, business-class, or first-class seating. A HR representative approved the request and informed both the second VP and the employee in August 2019.

Disparaged, denied travel requests. Over the next three months, the first VP repeatedly disparaged the employee’s disability and accommodation requests—including in front of the second VP, who expressed no disapproval of the remarks. Further, the second VP, in consultation with the first, denied the employee’s two requests for international travel, even as travel for other members of the team continued apace. One of the employee’s requests was for an annual conference in the United Kingdom that he had previously attended. The other was for a contract negotiation meeting in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) regarding its national tactical datalink program.

UAE business pursuits. The employee had pursued the UAE’s business for four years. He wrote most of the requirements the UAE issued in connection with the datalink project and put together a team that secured an initial contract representing $15 million in revenue for L3Harris. The company was poised to earn an additional $200 million in UAE business once the terms of the primary contract were finalized, and the employee planned to “hammer out those details at a negotiation with the UAE,” according to the court. But the first VP denied his travel request for that meeting, even after L3Harris’s partner on the deal asked him to send the employee. According to the employee, without him there to represent L3Harris, the UAE postponed further negotiations and then let the deal collapse entirely.

Removed from leadership role. In addition to denying travel requests, the second VP took steps to remove the employee from his leadership role. On October 23, the second VP held a meeting at a country club to announce his proposed reorganization of the business-development division. At that meeting, the employee learned at the same time as his colleagues of the VP’s plan to eliminate his senior-director position. Further, the VP announced his plan to install another employee as Director of International Business Development, a new role that effectively replaced the employee’s. The new position had not been posted internally, contrary to standard practice, and the VP’s plan did not mention a new role for the employee.

Confrontation. After the meeting, the employee confronted the VP about the newly created position and asked why the other employee was being placed in that role. The VP said he had heard the employee did not want the job. The employee corrected him—he did want it—and asked the VP to “fix it,” but the VP said he had already sent the proposed personnel change “up the chain” for approval. Because the changes had not been approved yet, however, the VP agreed to “see what [he] could do.” The employee then told the VP that “if he couldn’t fix it, [the employee] want[ed] to go somewhere else in the company.” And if all else failed, he said, the VP should “put a deal on the table” for him to consider.

“[P]ackaged out”? Instead of trying to walk back the reorganization or find the employee a new role, however, the VP contacted L3Harris’s VP of HR. He told HR that the employee wanted to be “packaged out” of the company and asked to add him to a “reduction in force” (RIF) planned for the following weeks. HR directed the VP to complete a RIF form, which he did with the help of the first VP and others.

Job “eliminated.” On November 7, the first VP called the employee—who was on vacation at the time—to inform him that his job had been “eliminated” and he needed to sign separation paperwork before he could see his severance package. Later, as L3Harris was reconsidering the other employee’s appointment to the director position, the second VP defended his decision to discharge the employee by offering a new, performance-based rationale that was inconsistent with the reduction-in-force justification. Specifically, he explained that the employee “was never told what his function was in the old structure under [the first VP]” and had “a continuity of reoccurring issues in organization, engagement, execution, and capture affecting the team and relations with[]in the entire... organization.”

Lawsuit, decision below, and appeal. The employee sued L3Harris for discriminatory and retaliatory discharge under the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act. Evaluating L3Harris’s summary-judgment motion, the district court recognized that the employee likely established a prima facie case of both discrimination and retaliation and proffered evidence showing L3Harris’s stated reason for terminating his employment was pretextual. The district court nevertheless granted L3Harris’s motion on the grounds that the employee presented “insufficient evidence tying... [his] [discharge] to the fact of his disability itself (or, under the retaliation claim, his request for accommodations).” The employee appealed.

Reeves. The Tenth Circuit first observed that Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 530 U.S. 133 (2000) primarily clarified that a plaintiff who has shown pretext under the McDonnell Douglas framework generally need not do anything further to avoid summary judgment. In doing so, the “Court rejected the so-called ‘pretext plus’ standard that required plaintiffs... to both show pretext and produce ‘additional evidence of discrimination.’” Although Reeves also acknowledged that “there will be instances where, although the plaintiff has established a prima facie case and set forth sufficient evidence to reject the defendant’s explanation, no rational factfinder could conclude that the action was discriminatory,” the Court has identified only two circumstances where this exception might apply: (1) if “the record conclusively revealed some other, nondiscriminatory reason for the employer’s decision” or (2) if “the plaintiff created only a weak issue of fact as to whether the employer’s reason was untrue and there was abundant and uncontroverted independent evidence that no discrimination had occurred.”

“[J]udicial guesswork.” Here, the appeals court observed, the district court relied on the first Reeves scenario—conclusive record evidence of “some other, nondiscriminatory reason for the employer’s decision”—to justify its order, and it cited the “undisputed” fact that the second VP’s intent to fire the employee “was formed only after the country[-]club conversation” (which was not about [the employee’s] cellulitis) to speculate that there was a nondiscriminatory reason for L3Harris’s decision. The district court hypothesized, for instance, that the second VP could have “believed [[the employee]] was unpleasant, or otherwise insubordinate, or... [could] have wanted to prove a point.”

This type of “judicial guesswork,” noted the Tenth Circuit, “is the very antithesis of the ‘conclusive[]’ evidence the first Reeves scenario contemplates.” And here, the record would permit a reasonable factfinder to conclude that the second VP’s decision to discharge the employee was tainted by animus, as were his decisions to deny his travel requests and remove him from his leadership role in the first place.

Second Reeves scenario also unavailing. The second Reeves scenario also did not apply because there was plenty of evidence that L3Harris’s initial explanation for his termination—that the employee requested to be “packaged out”—was “unworthy of credence.”

Narrow exception inapplicable. No undisputed facts, moreover, explained the second VP’s eliminating the employee’s position without notice or explanation, refusing to honor his promise to “fix” the situation, and then offering entirely contradictory and unexplainable reasons for firing him. Instead, concluded the appeals court, “these facts point towards a decision tainted by animus.”

Concurrence. In her concurring opinion, Judge Eid wrote “to underscore the problems with McDonnell Douglas and its fixation on pretext—problems that are especially pronounced in cases like this one, where the facts presented at summary judgment make the case close enough to go to a jury.” Citing Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Ames v. OhioDep’t of Youth Servs., 605 U.S. _, 145 S. Ct. 1540, 1548, 1551 (2025), Judge Eid said, “In short, the three-part burden-shifting framework is a ‘judge-made rule’ that lacks any basis in the text of Title VII, creates ‘outsized judicial confusion’ by requiring courts to maintain ‘artificial’ categories of evidence, and ultimately demands too much of plaintiffs at summary judgment.”

The case is No. 24-4032.

Judge: Moritz, N.

Attorneys: Andrew W. Stavros (Law Offices of Andrew W. Stavros) for David Jenny. Michael Patrick O'Brien (Parsons Behle & Latimer) for L3Harris Technologies, Inc.

Companies: L3Harris Technologies, Inc.

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