Annual Discrimination Update including Emerging Discrimination Risk with Third Party Medical Opinions

Presentation Materials

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Each year we take a look at recent developments in employment discrimination and put together a short survey to get you up to speed on what’s been happening this past year in the courts, administrative agencies, and the legislature. This year our focus was on hot topics in disability discrimination and accommodation—including leave as an accommodation, obesity and substance abuse as disabilities, and managing pregnant and lactating employees.

We then dove more deeply into employers’ use of assessments by occupational health providers to make employment decisions, from the post-offer, pre-employment, stage to resolving questions about an employee’s fitness for duty. While occupational health providers are often in the best position to assess an employee’s work capacity, they are generally not well suited to understand the ADA’s restrictions on medical examinations and when an employer can lawfully decline to hire or return an employee to work for medical reasons. As a result, third party providers can create liability for employers who blindly defer to their practices and opinions. Using real world examples, we facilitated a discussion on the most common pitfalls facing employers and how you can work with your occupational health provider to avoid them.

On April 12, Jim Erwin, Katy Rand and Lily Rao took a fast paced look at the most significant developments and zaniest cases from 2017 and a look ahead to what’s on the horizon for 2018.