News & Information

LABOR & EMPLOYMENT LAW — 9/22/08

Management lawyer advises employers to ready themselves for changes to ADA

"Employers need to immediately look at their existing policies, handbooks, procedures and job descriptions to determine whether they may now be at risk for a lawsuit under the ADA Amendments Act," advises Camille A. Olson, chair of the complex discrimination litigation practice group at Seyfarth Shaw LLP, in a statement released on September 17. Olson was a Senate and House witness who provided testimony on the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act, a measure that is expected to soon be signed into law.

"The ADA Amendments Act is the culmination of several months of the business community and disability advocates coming together to work toward the common goal of meeting the needs of employees without compromising the competitiveness of America's businesses.

"This law, effective January 1, 2009, expands the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under the ADA Amendments Act, millions of Americans may now claim to be disabled who prior to the new law were not considered to have a disability.

"The ADA Amendments Act undoes the Supreme Court's decisions on lawsuits brought under the ADA for over a decade, and every federal and state court decision that hinged on the reasoning of the Supreme Court's decisions on those lawsuits is now brought into question and may be wiped away. The ADA Amendments Act effectively resets our understanding of how employers and employees can best work together to address employees' disability-related requests for accommodation.

"The ADA Amendments Act may likely spark new lawsuits brought by plaintiffs seeking to test the law. For America's employers, this means that the rules they have learned and adopted concerning disability accommodation requests no longer apply. In the era of the ADA Amendments Act, many people with a treatable impairment could be considered disabled. Employers need to immediately look at their existing policies, handbooks, procedures and job descriptions to determine whether they may now be at risk for a lawsuit under the ADA Amendments Act."

Olson, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw, is a member of the firm's national labor and employment law steering committee as well as national chairperson of its complex discrimination litigation practice group. Olson's Senate testimony on the ADA Amendments Act is available online at: http://www.seyfarth.com/dir_docs/news_item/7ed12988-7768-4cb4-8943-61d19c77d063_documentupload.pdf.

For more information on this and other topics, consult CCH Employment Practices Guide or CCH Labor Relations.

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