Court of Appeals reinstates ADA reasonable accommodation claim: Tafolla Part I

The Court of Appeals has reinstated an Americans with Disabilities Act claim, holding that the jury may find that plaintiff's former employer, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, denied her a reasonable accommodation after she injured her back in a car accident. 

The case is Tafolla v. Heilig, issued on August 18. I briefed and argued the appeal and will summarize this decision in three parts. This segment focuses on a threshold issue: whether plaintiff's requested accommodation allowed her to avoid performing an essential job function. 

Under the ADA and New York law, the accommodation can never be reasonable if the plaintiff is unable to perform an essential job function. Here, plaintiff, an administrative assistant, was unable to perform the "archiving" function, which involved packing up old case files in the DA's office. Her doctor told management that plaintiff was unable to lift anything over five pounds or do any bending or pushing. 

The Court of Appeals (Bianco, Perez, and Sullivan [dissenting]) finds that the jury may determine that archiving was not an essential job function. Under Second Circuit case law, determining whether a job duty is essential is a fact-specific inquiry, though the courts will defer to management's assessment that a particular duty is essential. But we also consider other factors, including written job descriptions, the amount of time spent performing the function, and the work experience of prior and current employees in the position. This is a totality of the circumstances analysis. 

In discovery, plaintiff's supervisor admitted at deposition that he did not know if archiving was essential and the duty was "rather minimal." An ADA testified that archiving was "the last thing for the administrative assistants to get done because we have a lot of other pressing work to get done." There were no deadlines to complete the archiving task, and any archiving backlogs were not cause for concern. Plaintiff's job description does not list archiving as a job duty. A supervisor testified that administrative assistants would split up various office tasks among themselves; that presumably included archiving. So the work had to get done but it was not a priority in the office, and others could handle the archiving if plaintiff was unable to do so under her proposed accommodation.

Judging from the case citations in this ruling, there are not many cases that address the essential functions issue. But the Second Circuit does rely on Miller v. Dept. of Transportation, 643 F.3d 190 (7th Cir. 2011), which held that summary judgment was not warranted on the essential function where "it was a regular occurrence for individuals on a particular team to share and swap tasks according to their individual capacities, abilities, and limitations."

 

This portion of the case was not the most challenging part of plaintiff's appeal. Follow-up blog posts will talk about the reasonable accommodation and whether plaintiff was responsible for the breakdown in the interactive process.