You asked your employer for a modified schedule so you could attend dialysis three times a week. Or you requested a standing desk because of a spinal condition. Or you submitted documentation from your psychiatrist explaining that you needed to work from home two days a week to manage a serious anxiety disorder. The request was reasonable. Your doctor supported it. And instead of engaging with you about how to make it work, your employer started treating you like a liability. The write-ups began. Your responsibilities were stripped. Within weeks, you were terminated. Wrongful termination lawyers in Maryland handle these cases at the intersection of disability discrimination law and employment retaliation, and the pattern is disturbingly consistent: the accommodation request doesn’t just get denied. It marks the employee for removal.
The law doesn’t allow that. But proving it requires understanding how disability accommodation claims actually work and where the employer’s obligations begin and end.
The Legal Framework: ADA and Maryland Law
Two statutes protect Maryland employees who request disability accommodations. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq., applies to employers with 15 or more employees and prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in all aspects of employment. Maryland’s Fair Employment Practices Act (Md. Code, State Gov’t § 20-601 et seq.) provides parallel protections and is enforced through the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights.
Both statutes require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the business. Both also prohibit retaliation against employees who request accommodations or otherwise assert their rights under disability discrimination law.
A “qualified individual with a disability” is someone who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation. That’s the threshold question in every accommodation case, and it’s where employers most often try to reframe the narrative. Instead of engaging with the accommodation request, the employer argues that the employee can’t do the job at all, that the requested accommodation would eliminate an essential function, or that no reasonable accommodation exists. Sometimes those arguments are legitimate. Often they’re pretextual, designed to avoid the conversation the law requires the employer to have.
The Interactive Process and What Goes Wrong
The ADA doesn’t just require employers to grant or deny accommodation requests. It requires an interactive process: a good-faith dialogue between the employer and the employee aimed at identifying an effective accommodation. The employer is supposed to analyze the job’s essential functions, assess the employee’s limitations, consider possible accommodations, and work with the employee to select one that’s effective.
When the process works, it produces solutions that keep the employee productive while addressing the functional limitations of their disability. A customer service representative with carpal tunnel syndrome might be provided with voice recognition software. An analyst with ADHD might receive a workspace away from high-traffic areas. A delivery driver recovering from knee surgery might be temporarily reassigned to dispatch duties.
When the process breaks down, it usually breaks down in one of several recognizable ways.
The employer ignores the request entirely. The employee submits documentation, follows up repeatedly, and receives no response. Weeks pass. Eventually the employee is told their position has been eliminated or that their performance is no longer satisfactory.
The employer goes through the motions without genuine engagement. HR schedules a meeting, takes notes, requests additional medical documentation, and then denies the accommodation without explaining why or exploring alternatives. The interactive process becomes a box-checking exercise rather than a substantive effort to find a workable solution.
The employer grants the accommodation initially but revokes it after a short period, claiming it’s not sustainable or that business needs have changed. The employee, who reorganized their medical care and personal life around the accommodation, is left without support and vulnerable to the performance decline the accommodation was designed to prevent.
Each of these scenarios can give rise to a failure-to-accommodate claim under the ADA. But the scenario that produces the strongest wrongful termination cases is the one where the accommodation request itself triggers retaliation.
Failure to Accommodate vs. Retaliatory Termination
These are related but distinct legal claims, and an employee may have both.
A failure-to-accommodate claim focuses on the employer’s refusal to provide a reasonable accommodation. The employee must show they have a disability, they were qualified for the position, they requested reasonable accommodation, and the employer failed to provide one. The employer’s state of mind isn’t the central issue. The question is whether the accommodation was reasonable, whether the employer engaged in the interactive process, and whether the refusal was justified by undue hardship.
A retaliation claim focuses on why the employer took an adverse action. The employee must show they engaged in protected activity (requesting the accommodation), the employer took an adverse action (termination, demotion, discipline), and a causal connection exists between the request and the action. Retaliation is about motive. Did the employer fire the employee because of the accommodation request?
The distinction matters because a retaliation claim can succeed even when the underlying accommodation request is debatable. An employer who fires an employee for asking for an accommodation that might not have been legally required has still retaliated against the employee for engaging in protected activity. The accommodation request itself is protected regardless of whether the employer was ultimately obligated to grant it.
What Wrongful Termination Lawyers in Maryland Look For in Disability Retaliation Cases
The evidence patterns in disability accommodation retaliation overlap with other retaliation cases but have some distinctive features.
Timing between the request and the adverse action remains the most immediate indicator. An employee who requests an accommodation on March 1 and receives a Performance Improvement Plan on March 20 has a timeline that demands explanation. Courts in the Fourth Circuit recognize temporal proximity as circumstantial evidence of causation, and when the gap is measured in days or weeks, the inference is strong.
The employer’s response to the accommodation request itself becomes evidence. An employer who engaged genuinely in the interactive process, explored alternatives, and ultimately couldn’t find a workable solution looks very different from one who responded to the request with irritation, immediately escalated to HR, and began building a termination file. Emails exchanged between the employee’s supervisor and HR after the accommodation request are often the most revealing documents in these cases. Language expressing frustration about the request, questioning whether the employee “really” has a disability, or discussing how to handle the “situation” the request created all point toward retaliatory intent.
Changes in the employer’s characterization of the employee’s performance before and after the request follow the same pattern seen in other pretextual termination cases. An employee with a positive performance history who suddenly starts receiving negative feedback after requesting an accommodation is experiencing the documentation-out strategy, with the accommodation request as the triggering event.
Comparator evidence can be particularly powerful in disability cases. If non-disabled employees or employees who didn’t request accommodations were treated more favorably in similar performance situations, the disparity supports an inference that the disability, not the performance, drove the employer’s actions.
The employer’s handling of other accommodation requests across the organization can also be revealing. Discovery sometimes shows that the employer granted similar accommodations to other employees without difficulty, which undermines the claim that the plaintiff’s request was unreasonable or would have imposed an undue hardship.
Medical Documentation and Its Role in the Case
The employee’s medical records occupy a central role in any disability accommodation claim. The documentation must establish that the employee has a disability within the meaning of the ADA (a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities), that the disability affects their ability to perform specific job functions, and that the requested accommodation would enable them to perform those functions.
The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 broadened the definition of disability significantly, overturning earlier court decisions that had interpreted the term narrowly. Under the current standard, conditions like diabetes, epilepsy, PTSD, major depression, cancer, autoimmune disorders, and chronic pain conditions generally qualify. The question is rarely whether the employee has a “disability” under the statute. The question is whether the accommodation requested was reasonable and whether the employer’s failure to provide it, or its retaliatory response to the request, caused the employee’s termination.
Treating physicians who can articulate both the functional limitations and the specific accommodations needed are essential to building the case. Vague letters stating that the employee “needs accommodation” without specifying what that means give the employer room to argue that the request was too ambiguous to trigger the interactive process obligation.
Filing Deadlines
Disability discrimination and retaliation claims under the ADA require the employee to file an administrative charge with the EEOC within 300 days of the adverse action in Maryland (because Maryland is a deferral state with the MCCR). Claims under Maryland’s FEPA can be filed with the MCCR directly. These deadlines run from the date of the termination or other adverse action, not from the date of the accommodation request.
Employees who are still employed but experiencing retaliation for an accommodation request should consider filing a charge before they’re terminated. A pending EEOC charge creates a documented record of the retaliation and strengthens the causal connection argument if termination follows.
Your Accommodation Request Was a Right, Not a Favor
Requesting a disability accommodation under the ADA is a legally protected act. The employer was obligated to engage with you in good faith, explore whether the accommodation was feasible, and either provide it or explain why it couldn’t be provided. If the employer’s response was to treat your request as an inconvenience and engineer your departure, the law gives you a path to hold them accountable. Wrongful termination lawyers in Maryland who handle disability discrimination cases can evaluate whether your employer violated its accommodation obligations, whether the termination was retaliatory, and what remedies are available to you under both federal and Maryland law. The Mundaca Law Firm represents employees across Maryland who were fired after requesting the accommodations they were entitled to. If the timeline between your request and your termination tells a story that your employer can’t explain, bring that story to an attorney before the filing deadlines pass.
