An accommodation request, annotated
The severance agreement and the wage statement were documents done to you; this one you get to draft. Below is an accommodation request of the kind that works — one page, seven moves — with the margin explaining why each sentence is load-bearing. It is the most consequential letter in this library that almost no one writes.
SPECIMEN — ACCOMMODATION REQUEST (email to HR, copy to your own address; fictional and deliberately typical)
¶1 — Subject line. “Subject: Request for reasonable accommodation” 1
¶2 — The condition, at the right altitude. “I am writing to request a reasonable accommodation. I have a medical condition that currently limits my ability to lift and to reach overhead.” 2
¶3 — The restrictions, from the doctor. “My doctor has set the following restrictions, expected to last approximately twelve weeks: no lifting over 20 pounds; no repetitive overhead reaching. A note stating these restrictions is attached.” 3
¶4 — What you can do. “I can continue to perform the core duties of my position — receiving, inventory, ordering, and supervising the morning crew — with adjustments to the lifting portions of the role.” 4
¶5 — The proposals, plural. “Two adjustments that I believe would work: (a) team-lift or pallet-jack handling for items over the restriction, which our safety manual already encourages; or (b) temporarily swapping the heavy-receiving window with the scanning and ordering duties now assigned to the second lead. I am open to other options that meet the restrictions.” 5
¶6 — The meeting. “I would welcome a conversation this week about these or any alternatives you think workable.” 6
¶7 — The close. “Please reply in writing. If it would help, my doctor can answer specific questions about the restrictions. Thank you — I want to keep doing this job, and I expect these restrictions to be temporary.” 7
The margin
1 No magic words are legally required — a jury can find notice from far less — but clarity converts. “Reasonable accommodation” in the subject line ends any later argument about whether the employer understood what this was. You are not hinting; you are invoking.[a]
2 The altitude matters twice. California’s threshold is a condition that limits a major life activity — the state legislature deliberately rejected the stricter federal wording, so do not talk yourself out of coverage before you start.[b] And note what ¶2 does not contain: a diagnosis. Your functional limitations are the employer’s business; your chart is not. Naming the limitation instead of the disease is not evasion — it is precisely the information the process runs on.
3 The doctor’s note should read like this paragraph: restrictions and duration, nothing else. A note that says “no lifting over 20 pounds for 12 weeks” is a work document; records, test results, and histories stay at the clinic. If HR sends a form demanding more, the form is answerable at the same altitude — limitations and duration.
4 The quiet pivot of the whole letter. An accommodation request frames capability: which essential functions you can perform, with what adjustment. Left to itself, the file tells a story about what you cannot do; ¶4 makes the record say what you can. Essential functions are the duties the job exists to perform — not every task that has ever drifted onto your plate.[c]
5 Plural proposals do three jobs: they prove the request is serious, they start the meeting with an agenda instead of a blank page, and they make a later “nothing was feasible” defense read strangely against the two feasible things in writing. Honest caveat in both directions: the employer may choose any effective accommodation, not necessarily your preferred one — and among the options the law knows are modified duties, equipment, schedule changes, reassignment to a vacant position, and finite leave. Indefinite leave is the one thing the doctrine does not require.[d]
6 One sentence, and the legal machinery engages: once an employer knows of the need, it owes a timely, good-faith interactive process — the structured conversation our primer walks through.[e] Courts looking at a failed process ask, in effect, who stopped answering. This letter makes the opening move unmissable; from here, every unanswered week is their silence, not yours.
7 “Please reply in writing” is the same quiet engine that runs half this library. And the last sentence — I want to keep doing this job — is strategy disguised as courtesy: it makes the letter impossible to caricature as a resignation in progress, and it happens to be true of nearly everyone who writes one.
If the answer is “come back when you’re 100%.” Some employers respond to a letter like this with a policy: no return with restrictions, no modified duty, come back healed. Understand what has just happened. A blanket rule that refuses all restrictions is the refusal to do the individualized analysis the statute and its regulations require — the position is not a defense; it is the violation, stated as policy.[f] Do not argue in the meeting. Get the policy in writing, keep your letter, and read this month’s case file, which is about exactly this reply.
Related writing: The interactive process: the conversation your employer owed you · Pregnancy, family, and medical leave: the California stack · Case file: the note
Notes
a. Gov. Code §12940(m)–(n). b. Gov. Code §12926.1 (broad construction; “limits” without “substantially”). c. Gov. Code §12926(f). d. 2 Cal. Code Regs. §11068 (forms of reasonable accommodation, including reassignment and finite leave). e. Gov. Code §12940(n); 2 Cal. Code Regs. §11069. f. Gov. Code §12940(m); 2 Cal. Code Regs. §§11068–11069 (individualized assessment; see the case-law consensus treating inflexible “fully healed” policies as per se failures to accommodate).
Specimen and annotations state California law as of the revision date; the letter is a teaching document, not advice for a particular situation.
This article states California law as of its revision date and is analysis, not legal advice. Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising.