His numbers were record-breaking – so why did the layoff paperwork suddenly speed up
A jury found Wells Fargo retaliated against a top salesperson who asked to work from home permanently. A federal appeals court upheld it.
On August 21, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit mostly upheld a jury’s verdict against Wells Fargo Securities, keeping alive a finding that the bank retaliated against a managing director who had requested a disability accommodation.
The employee had spent nearly three decades at the firm, rising from intern to managing director while managing a serious medical condition his coworkers had long known about. For years he handled it with informal flexibility. As his health worsened, he relied on a quiet understanding with his manager that he could step away from his desk, or work from home, when he needed to.
Then, in 2021, his longtime manager left. He began reporting to three senior executives he barely knew. Worried that an informal arrangement would leave him seeking permission every time his symptoms flared, he filed a formal request in August to work from home permanently.
The request landed badly. According to the court’s account of the trial record, senior managers reacted with surprise and skepticism, asked what they needed “to push[] back,” and decided that accommodating him would only “delay[] the inevitable.” His performance rating slipped from “exceeds” to “meets” expectations despite record sales, and, the record showed, managers “iced” him out of conversations.
Around the same stretch, the bank folded him into a cost-cutting layoff already underway. The paperwork moved unusually fast – roughly two months from decision to discharge, against a typical five-month lead time. He was fired in February 2022, two weeks after the firm announced a return-to-office date.
The jury awarded more than $22 million across several claims. On appeal, most of it fell away. The court reversed the failure-to-accommodate claim, finding the employee had worked from home every day until his firing, so no accommodation was ever actually withheld. It also reversed the disability-discrimination verdict, ruling the evidence showed hostility to his request, not to his disability – which the firm had known about for years.
What survived was retaliation. The compressed timeline, the downgraded review and the managers’ documented resistance were enough for a jury to conclude the firing punished a protected request. An accommodations consultant’s near-contemporaneous notes, recording the managers’ intent to resist, cut against their testimony at trial.
The court kept the $14 million front-pay award and ordered back pay cut to about $4.2 million. A dissenting judge would have left the full verdict intact.
