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When remote work reaches a jury, flexibility is what will hold up in court

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by Gleb Tsipursky, opinion contributor - 05/19/26 9:00 AM ET

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by Gleb Tsipursky, opinion contributor - 05/19/26 9:00 AM ET

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Picture a control room that never sleeps, its dispatchers routing gas emergency crews from kitchen tables and spare bedrooms while the city hums outside. Then picture those same dispatchers being told to report to work in person despite having the same duties, the same tools, and the same results.

Recently, a Brooklyn jury delivered a $3.1 million award against National Grid for denying continued telework to two dispatchers suffering from medical conditions. During the pandemic, dispatchers did the job from home with company systems and met the mark. After offices reopened, workers with documented disabilities asked to keep teleworking and were refused.

Jurors evaluate results, not slogans. If emergency routing worked from home using the same people, the same laptops, and the same workflows, a later insistence on presence reads like preference rather than necessity.

The signal to leaders is direct: When a case built on hard performance evidence reaches a jury, remote-work flexibility wins.

Other juries have followed the same logic. In July 2024, a Charlotte panel awarded $22.1 million to a former managing director at Wells Fargo, after concluding that a work-from-home accommodation linked to a medical condition was mishandled during a return-to-office push. Public enforcement has moved in parallel. In January 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced a consent decree against a facility-management employer that had refused part-time telework for a high-risk worker, summarized in the agency settlement report.

These matters do not turn on novel legal theories. They turn on records showing that the work got done and that companies’ claims of hardship due to having remote workers lacked substantiating evidence.

For executives, that becomes an operational test. If teams prove the job can be done successfully from home, management must offer task-level reasons for changing course, supported with quality metrics, response times, safety data, and customer outcomes. If collaboration is the rationale, they must identify the specific tasks requiring co-location and the alternatives tried. Juries reward specifics over generalities and evidence over rhetoric.

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not grant a universal right to work from home. It does require an individualized assessment grounded in essential functions and undue hardship. But even on that traditional frame, the center of gravity has moved because the facts on the ground have changed.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s longstanding telework guidance explains that working at home may be a reasonable accommodation when duties can be performed without significant difficulty or expense. The agency’s COVID-era technical assistance, last updated on May 15, 2023, states that the end of a public health emergency does not permit automatic termination of pandemic accommodations, and that prior remote performance can be relevant when evaluating renewed requests. The foundational enforcement guidance centers the interactive process and places the burden on employers to demonstrate real difficulty or expense, not conjecture.

Appellate decisions now reflect this evidentiary turn. In August 2024, the D.C. Circuit Court held that whether an agency’s take-it-or-leave-it telework offer was a reasonable accommodation presented a jury question based on disputed facts. In November 2022, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that an employer’s own hybrid practices and the employee’s performance record can make telework feasibility a fact issue.

In February 2024, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that an environmental health and safety manager’s essential duties required on-site presence, clarifying that remote work remains unreasonable when core functions demand physical presence. And in 2015, the Sixth Circuit’s en banc Ford Motor decision held that telecommuting was not reasonable for a highly interactive role tied to real-time collaboration.

Read together, these authorities do not create a universal telework right. They impose a practical burden of proof. Employers win when their duty-by-duty evidence shows why presence is essential and how alternatives fail. Employees win when the record shows remote success, documented metrics, and an interactive process that the employer actually applied rather than ignored.

The lesson is tactical. Update job descriptions so that essential functions are explicit and connected to place, if they actually require in-person presence. But avoid false stateme