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On April 15, 2024, the NAM filed an amicus brief asking the 1st Circuit to reverse a district court decision that requires employers to hire a “surrogate” employee as a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In this case, an employee suffered from severe anxiety that made it difficult for her to perform her essential, public-facing job functions. She requested from her employer the accommodation of a “surrogate” to perform those essential functions, which her employer denied as unreasonable. The plaintiff subsequently sued her employer in the District of Massachusetts alleging that her employer violated the ADA by failing to grant her request for accommodation. The district court, over the employer’s objection, instructed the jury that an example of a reasonable accommodation included “qualified readers” which the plaintiff’s counsel equated to a “surrogate” during closing arguments at trial. Thereafter, a jury returned a verdict of $24 million in damages for the employee, which the district court refused to overturn—the employer appealed the decision to the 1st Circuit.

We argue in our amicus brief that the ADA does not require employers to hire someone else to perform the essential functions of an employee’s job. Unlike a surrogate, a “reader’ helps an employee perform the essential functions of the job himself; readers do not do the job for that employee. Expanding the notion of reasonable accommodation to include job surrogates is a misguided approach that imposes an unreasonable burden on employers.