Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—DISABILITY—W.D. Okla.: Insurance company employee, fired after requesting five pound lifting restriction, advances claims, (May 12, 2025)

By Todd Harrison, J.D.

A previous request for a lifting restriction of 10 pounds was informally accommodated, casting doubt on why the employer found the subsequent request to be unreasonable.

Denying American Fidelity Assurance’s motion for summary judgment against the ADA discrimination, failure to accommodate, and retaliation claims asserted by a former senior document management technician, a federal district court in Oklahoma found there was minimally sufficient evidence to create a triable issue of fact as to each claim. The court did grant partial summary judgment to the employee with regard to her claim that she has an actual or record of disability within the meaning of the ADA (Simpson v. American Fidelity Assurance, Co., No. CIV-24-512-R (W.D. Okla. May 8, 2025)).

Prior to her termination, the employee was one of approximately seven document technicians on the employer’s claims team. The claims team is responsible for sorting, scanning, and digitally indexing incoming claims for benefits and insurance premium checks. Daily tasks are rotated amongst team members and some are performed in teams of two or more. There are no written criteria for the rotation of tasks.

Job characterizations. According to the employer, the employee’s position is a physically active one, requiring the handling of batches of paper weighing more than five pounds. It further contends that the team works together in a sequential workflow that depends on employees completing one task before the next task can begin.

Disputing this characterization, the employee contended that most of her day involved working at a desk on a computer. She further stated that only some tasks need to be performed sequentially, and other tasks that are assigned to multiple team members meant that one member could perform tasks involving lifting more than five pounds while the other member could perform the remaining tasks. She also alleged that some tasks were not rotated amongst team members for a year or two because some members enjoyed performing those tasks.

Back, neck problems. It was undisputed that the employee suffered from a back and neck impairment that required regular treatment, including surgeries in 2021 and 2022.

Informal accommodation. In 2021, the employee requested not to lift anything weighing more than 10 pounds. The employer informally accommodated this request, with the employee’s lead telling her that it would not be problem and “[d]on’t let your paper piles get too heavy.”

Formal accommodation request. After taking medical leave following her second surgery, the employee returned to work in mid-March 2023 without any work restrictions. That June, in response to an email from her lead about not completing recycling tasks, the employee stated she did not feel strong enough to perform manual labor and would supply a doctor’s note. That same day, she emailed the HR department formally requesting an accommodation and provided a form from her physician suggesting, among other things, a lifting restriction of no more than five pounds.

When HR inquired about the possibility of accommodating the request for two weeks, the head of the department promptly responded that the restriction would cause a hardship and that the employee would be unable to perform 70 percent of her job duties.

Administrative leave. The next morning, the department head sent the HR team a document highlighting areas of the job that the employee would be unable to perform. The HR team met with the employee, who was then placed on administrative leave while the employer considered her request.

Over the next several days, the HR team worked with the employee’s lead and department head to create and revise a “work illustration” outlining the functions of the job and the impact of the lifting restriction.

Termination. On July 10, the HR team scheduled a meeting with the employee, ostensibly to provide an update of her leave status and a review of her restrictions. When the meeting took place two days later, the employee was terminated. An HR employee testified that this determination had been made prior to the meeting taking place. Subsequently, the employee filed this lawsuit.

Essential functions. First, the court addressed the failure to accommodate claim, beginning with the employer’s contention that the ability to lift five or more pounds is an essential function of the position. To support this contention, the employer relied on the job description and the department lead’s description of the actual demands of the job, which she asserted involved the picking up or moving heavy stacks of documents for nearly every task.

According to the employee, the actual essential functions of the position are processing and verifying information from incoming claims. To the extent that these tasks involved the handling of stacks of documents, the employee contended that the ability to move heavy stacks was not essential because there were other means of doing so, such as by handling multiple smaller stacks. In support of this argument, the employee pointed out that large stacks are often divided to fit in a scanner, and that the employer had previously accommodated a lifting restriction request by suggesting that she not let her paper piles get too heavy.

Viewing the evidence in the employee’s favor, the court determined that there was room for reasonable disagreement regarding the essential functions of the job.

Reasonable accommodation. Even if there was a dispute over the essential functions of the position, the employer nevertheless argued that summary judgment was warranted because there was no reasonable accommodation that would allow the employee to do her job. The employee countered that there was a genuine factual dispute as to whether a reasonable accommodation exists and relied, in part, on the employer’s failure to engage in the interactive process.

Interactive process. With regard to the employee’s claim that the employer failed to engage in the interactive process, the court noted that there was evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that the employer did not fulfill its obligations. The department head and team lead were quick to conclude that the restriction was a hardship. They then went through a process of evaluating job duties and descriptions with an HR team, never seeking input from the employee. This could be viewed as the employer being more interested in justifying its position rather than working with the employee to understand her precise limitations and whether any reasonable accommodations were available, said the court.

Further, the court was not moved by the employer’s contention that the employee was involved in the process because she was given the opportunity to ask questions during her termination meeting, noting that the decision had already been made and the purpose of the meeting was to fire the employee, not to engage in an interactive conversation

Possible accommodations. Looking to whether the employee had identified a reasonable accommodation, the court pointed to email communications wherein the employee indicated she felt comfortable performing most tasks, save for recycling duties and closing the office, and had requested more frequent task rotation and job restructuring. She also suggested reasonable accommodations could include permitting her to divide heavy stacks of documents into smaller stacks, assigning her to tasks that did not require heavy lifting, or reassignment to a vacant position.

Reassignment. Shifting the burden to the employer to show an inability to provide a reasonable accommodation, it first argued that it had considered reassignment but concluded that it could not accommodate her restrictions because every position required employees to carry a laptop and case weighing more than five pounds. However, the court found this argument “strains credulity” and was further evidence that the employer did not engage in the interactive process in good faith, noting that there must have been a reasonable accommodation that could be put in place, or at least considered as part of the interactive process, to address this issue.

The employer’s second argument on this point fared better—that none of the positions identified by the employee were actually vacant. The employer stated that this was because the positions were with a separate company, had opened after the employee had been fired, were at a higher grade, were filled prior to the employee’s accommodation request, or were never filled.

Paper stacks. With regard to the suggested accommodation of breaking up heavy stacks of paper into smaller stacks, the employer argued that this was not reasonable because doing so would require extra steps, increase the potential for misplacement, and slow down the sequential workflow. However, the court noted evidence casting doubt on this assertion, pointing to the fact that when the employee had requested a 10 pound lifting restriction, she was told not to let her paper stacks get too heavy.

The employer “does not explain why reducing the size of the paper piles was reasonable in 2021 but is unreasonable now,” said the court.

Shifting work. According to the employer, assigning the employee to tasks that do not violate her lifting restriction is unreasonable because it shifts the physical work to her colleagues. However, the court observed that there was evidence that the employer had reallocated various tasks amongst its employees based on their personal preferences for lengthy periods of time, apparently without issue.

Given the conflicting evidence regarding the essential functions of the job, the employer’s engagement in the interactive process, and the reasonableness of the proposed accommodations, the court found that these issues could not be resolved at the summary judgment stage.

Undue hardship. Next, the employer argued that summary judgment was appropriate because accommodating the employee’s lifting restriction for one year would present an undue hardship. The court again noted the conflicting evidence as set forth in its failure to accommodate analysis, and found this was minimally sufficient for this issue to survive summary judgment.

Disparate treatment. Turning to the employee’s claim for disability discrimination, the employer maintained that it had a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for terminating the employee—that she was unable to perform the essential functions of her job and accommodations would create an undue hardship.

To show pretext, the employee pointed to an email from the department head wherein she described the employee as seeking an accommodation to get out of performing certain job duties, another exchange between the team lead and department head where they criticized the request as being self-serving, and the lead’s purported exaggeration of the impact of the restrictions and proposed accommodations.

Finding this presented a close question, the court nonetheless found sufficient evidence to create a genuine factual dispute as to pretext.

Retaliation. Finally, the court addressed the employee’s ADA retaliation claim. Here again the court found that the employee had introduced minimally sufficient evidence to create a triable issue of fact. Accordingly, the employer’s motion for summary judgment against all claims was denied, while the employee’s claim for summary judgment with regard to her claim that she has an actual or record of disability within the meaning of the ADA was granted.

The case is No. CIV-24-512-R.

Judge: Russell, D.

Attorneys: Amber L. Hurst (Hammons Hurst & Associates) for Malic Simpson. Heath T. Albert (Porter Hedges) for American Fidelity Assurance, Co.

Companies: American Fidelity Assurance, Co.

Cases: Discrimination DisabilityDiscrimination Discharge Retaliation OklahomaNews