What To Do If You Were Fired Shortly After Requesting a Workplace Accommodation

Being let go days or weeks after you asked your employer for a reasonable accommodation is one of the clearest red flags in employment law. Maybe you requested modified duties after a diagnosis, asked for leave to manage a chronic condition, or needed a schedule change for a disability. If your job ended not long after, you may be dealing with unlawful retaliation rather than a coincidence. The Mundaca Law Firm works with employees across New York who are trying to figure out whether their termination crossed a legal line, and timing like this is often the first thing worth examining closely.

Why Timing Matters So Much

Employment lawyers pay close attention to the sequence of events because the law does too. When a firing happens close on the heels of a protected request, courts and agencies treat that closeness as circumstantial evidence of a retaliatory motive. There’s no fixed rule that says two weeks counts and two months doesn’t, but the shorter the gap, the harder it becomes for an employer to explain the decision as unrelated. A performance review that was glowing in January and suddenly critical in March, right after an accommodation request landed on a manager’s desk, tells a story that a jury can understand without much help.

That said, timing alone rarely wins a case by itself. It opens the door. What happens next is building the rest of the picture.

Requesting an Accommodation Is a Legally Protected Act

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the New York State Human Rights Law, and the New York City Human Rights Law, employees have the right to ask for reasonable accommodations related to a disability, pregnancy, religious practice, or certain other protected circumstances. Employers are required to engage in an interactive process to consider the request, and firing someone because they made that request, rather than because the accommodation was somehow impossible to provide, is illegal.

This protection exists independent of whether the accommodation was ultimately granted. An employee doesn’t lose retaliation protection just because the employer decided the request couldn’t be met. If the real reason for termination was the request itself, or the inconvenience it created, that’s retaliation.

Signs Your Firing Was Connected to the Request

A few patterns tend to show up in these cases. Supervisors who were previously satisfied with an employee’s work suddenly start documenting minor issues. HR gets involved in ways that feel disproportionate to whatever is being alleged. Coworkers mention that a manager complained about the accommodation being a burden. Sometimes the accommodation request is simply ignored, and the termination arrives before any real conversation about it ever happens.

Another common pattern involves a sudden reorganization or “position elimination” that conveniently removes the one employee who just asked for modified hours or leave. If your role wasn’t actually eliminated, or someone else was hired to do similar work shortly after, that inconsistency matters.

Steps To Take Right Away

Start collecting anything that documents the accommodation request itself: the email, the note to HR, the doctor’s letter, whatever form the request took. Save your performance history too, especially anything showing strong reviews before the request went in. Write down what happened in the days and weeks between the request and the termination while the details are still fresh, including who said what and when.

Resist the urge to sign a severance agreement or release quickly. These documents often waive your right to bring a claim, and once signed, they’re difficult to undo. Reviewing the paperwork with an employment attorney before signing anything protects options you may not realize you have.

You also have the right to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the New York State Division of Human Rights, and there are deadlines for doing so. An attorney can walk you through which agency makes sense for your situation and how the filing process works.

How An Attorney Evaluates These Cases

Building a retaliation case usually means reconstructing a timeline: the accommodation request, any response from the employer, changes in treatment, and the termination itself. Attorneys look at emails, internal messages, performance documentation, and witness accounts to see whether the employer’s stated reason for the firing holds up or looks like a pretext manufactured after the fact.

Employers rarely admit that a firing was retaliatory. The case is usually built on inconsistencies: shifting explanations, comparisons to how similar situations were handled for other employees, and the proximity between the protected request and the job loss.

Talk To Someone Before Too Much Time Passes

If you were fired not long after asking for an accommodation, the timing alone is worth having reviewed by someone who handles these cases regularly. Deadlines apply to discrimination and retaliation claims, and evidence gets harder to gather the longer you wait. The team at The Mundaca Law Firm evaluates situations like this every week and can tell you honestly whether what happened to you looks like retaliation under New York or federal law. Reach out and walk through what happened. Getting an early read on your options costs you nothing and may make all the difference in what you’re able to recover.