The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 20 that employers are not obligated to investigate whether an employee has a disability unless the employee gives a clear signal one exists, affirming dismissal of ADA and FMLA claims brought by a former hospital CAT scan technologist.

In Hileman v. West Penn Allegheny Health System, the plaintiff was reprimanded for absences and told how to request an accommodation or leave, but never did. After a coworker reported her sleeping during a night shift, she denied it but mentioned, for the first time, that a change in diabetes medication was causing dry eyes and fatigue. She was fired for misconduct. The court held that a late, vague mention made only after being confronted is not the kind of notice that triggers an employer’s duty to accommodate. “Employers’ duty to accommodate is real, but it is not a license to speculate,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote. “They must respond to what they know, not what they might imagine,” and “certainly need not go digging for disabilities without a signal that one exists.”

For HR compliance teams, the ruling sharpens a line that automated accommodation-tracking and case-management tools have struggled to encode: a system built to flag “possible disability” from any health-related comment risks over-triggering, while one that requires an explicit request risks missing employees who do not know the process. The Third Circuit’s standard, that an employer must act on what a reasonable person would recognize as a signal, gives compliance teams a workable test to train intake staff and accommodation software against, layered onto the broader retreat of federal disability and disparate-impact protections HR departments are already rewriting their compliance programs around.

The court separately sanctioned the plaintiff’s attorney $14,636.50 for filing errors tied to apparent AI-generated hallucinations, a reminder that generative tools now carry court-facing risk for the outside lawyers HR relies on, not just for HR’s own systems.

Source: Third Circuit Court of Appeals