July 26, 2025, marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), the federal law that created far-reaching protections for individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including in the workplace, where it mandates equal access to the same employment opportunities and benefits for qualified individuals with a disability that are available to persons without disabilities. On signing the law into effect back in 1992, President George H.W. Bush noted:

With today’s signing of the landmark Americans [with] Disabilities Act, every man, woman, and child with a disability can now pass through once-closed doors into a bright era of equality, freedom, and independence.

The ADA’s Legacy and Compliance Challenges

There is little doubt that the ADA has provided millions of Americans with disabilities the chance to develop their talents and make their unique contributions to the world. With that said, however, from an employer perspective, the ADA remains, for compliance purposes, among the most daunting of federal workplace laws. One of the challenges employers regularly face is conforming to the ADA’s “interactive process” mandate, which requires employers and employees to engage in an open and collaborative dialogue to identify appropriate reasonable accommodations of the employee’s disability. 

In theory, this seems simple enough; in practice, it is anything but that. The interactive dialogue must be individualized for each employee, and the required back-and-forth is often lengthy. A failure by the employer to satisfy the requirements of the ADA’s interactive process can lead to legal liability. On the other hand, employees who are not sufficiently cooperative in the process may find themselves without a legal remedy. A recent decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, discussed below, highlights both the difficulties of the interactive process and the increased focus of the courts on the mutual engagement obligations required in the interactive process, including the question of whether the employee has acted in good faith to inform the employer of his medical condition and accommodation needs.

The ADA Basics

The ADA prohibits an employer from discriminating against a “qualified individual,” i.e., a person who, with or without a reasonable accommodation can perform the essential functions of the job. Discrimination includes an employer’s failure to make reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability who is an employee (or applicant for employment.

The employee is typically responsible for initiating the “accommodation” process by informing his employer of his disability, which then triggers the employer obligation to engage the employee in an interactive dialogue to identify a reasonable accommodation. The “reasonable accommodation” element of the ADA imposes a duty upon employers to engage in a flexible, interactive process with the disabled employee needing accommodation so that, together, they can identify the employee’s “precise limitations resulting from the disability and potential reasonable accommodations that could overcome those limitations.” 

The Interactive Process

The ADA does not require an employer to take the employee’s word for it that the employee has a disability that may require special accommodation. The purpose of the ADA interactive process is to give the employer a chance to confirm that it has a duty to accommodate the employee to begin with. Employers have a right to enough information so that, under the circumstances, the employer can be fairly said to know both disability and need for an accommodation. The process requires employees to produce current and complete medical information and engage in bilateral, “good-faith communications” while an employer that disrupts or sabotages the interactive process is deemed to have denied the disabled employee the equal opportunity the ADA mandates, according to the Fourth Circuit.

Courts Have Focused in the Past on the Employer When the Interactive Process Breaks Down

Acquiring current and complete medical information in order to determine whether the employee has a disability and needs a reasonable accommodation is a key tenet of the interactive process. Historically, the majority of the case law in the Fourth Circuit has focused on whether the employer has done enough to satisfy its obligations to engage in good faith communications to gather information about an employee’s medical condition and need for reasonable accommodations. Of late, however, courts have been increasingly emphasizing the fact that the ADA interactive process is a mutual obligation, focusing their attention more critically on the relative cooperativeness of the employee.

What Happens When the Employee is not Interactive Enough?

Instructive is the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in Tarquinio v. Johns Hopkins University. Applied Physics Lab, a case that stretches back to the COVID-19 pandemic and involves the Lab’s requirement that employees vaccinate themselves against the disease. Plaintiff, a systems engineer at the Lab, had been diagnosed twice with Lyme disease, from which she suffers lingering after-effects, including Lyme-induced immune dysregulation, according to her doctors. She asked the Lab for a medical exemption, fearing that if she got vaccinated the COVID antigens would “cause her body to go crazy due to immune chaos.”  The employee submitted to the Lab a 2012 blood test showing that she’d had Lyme disease when the test was taken and also submitted a form signed by her medical provider, named “chronic Lyme Disease [and] Lyme induced immune dysregulation.”  In response, the Lab informed the employee that it still needed access to her current medical records and to speak with her treating doctors because Lyme disease is not a medical contraindication for COVID vaccination.

What followed was a protracted back-and-forth between the Lab and the employee as to whether she would release her current medical records and allow the Lab to speak with her doctors. The employee refused, and the Lab denied her request for a medical exemption from the COVID vaccine based on the documents she had already submitted.  Ultimately, the employee did not get vaccinated, and the Lab terminated her employment.

Failure to Accommodate Litigation Issues

The employee then sued the Lab claiming, among other things, that the Lab did not accommodate her disability, in violation of the ADA. The trial court granted summary judgment to the Lab on all counts, and the employee appealed the decision. On appeal, the Fourth Circuit also decided in favor of the Lab, upholding the trial court’s conclusion that (1) the employee had improperly refused to participate in the interactive process despite the Lab’s good faith efforts, and (2) the Lab could not be held liable for failing to provide the employee with a reasonable accommodation when the employee’s recalcitrance had essentially interfered with the employer’s chance to gather information to confirm that it had an obligation to provide the employee with an accommodation. 

Tarquinio’s Takeaways for Employers?

The Fourth Circuit made clear once again that employers have a good faith obligation under the ADA to engage an employee who has requested a reasonable accommodation in the interactive process with the employee and to carry that dialogue through to the finish.  An employer may expose itself to some legal risks if it cuts the interactive process short, unless the employer can show that no reasonable accommodation for the employee was possible under the circumstances and, therefore, no further interactive process was necessary. 

Tarquinio also made it equally clear that the ADA’s interactive process requirements are mutual.  Employees must reasonably participate in the interactive process for long enough to provide the employer with enough medical information that, under the circumstances, the employer can be fairly said to know of both the employee’s disability and desire for an accommodation. Employees who (1) refuse to engage reasonably in discussions with management about requested or alternative accommodations, (2) fail to timely return the employer’s medical information forms, or (3) balk at giving the employer access to the employee’s medical records or permission to speak with the employee’s medical provider, may find themselves without a legal remedy, on the losing end of an ADA failure to reasonably accommodate claim.

Bean, Kinney & Korman’s employment law practice group works proactively with employers of all sizes, in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, to craft a full range of employment policies and documents to meet the compliance challenges of the ADA, and all applicable federal, state, and local employment laws. If you have questions about the ADA, or need assistance with your company’s workforce policies or forms, please contact Doug Taylor at (703) 525-4000 or rdougtaylor@beankinney.com, or your current Bean, Kinney & Korman attorney.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not contain or convey legal advice. Consult a lawyer. Any views or opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily the views of any client.