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

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........

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