If an employee tells you — repeatedly, over the course of months — that the work environment is making them physically ill, firing them roughly a month after they take disability leave sounds like a lawsuit in the making.
K&L Gates is learning this lesson the hard way. Bonnie Carter, a former IT manager has filed a federal lawsuit against the firm in the Western District of Pennsylvania, asserting claims of discrimination, retaliation, and hostile work environment. The heart of the allegations are that the firm violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by terminating her just 32 days after she returned from approved short-term disability leave. And the timeline the complaint lays out is, to use a legal term of art, not super great for the defense.
Carter joined K&L Gates in March 2023 as Manager of Endpoint Engineering, overseeing IT engineers and handling technical issues across the firm’s global offices. She alleges that she received positive performance reviews in December 2023 and December 2024 and routinely worked 50-plus hour weeks.
According to the complaint, problems began when the firm hired a new Chief Information Officer, Harpreet Suri, in August 2023. Within months, plaintiff alleges that the new regime set the tone by telling IT staff that “everyone she has encountered in the IT department is generally lazy and gets paid too much.” There are allegations that the CIO “routinely yelled and screamed” at IT staff, made threats about job security, and generally ran the department through intimidation.
One notable allegation claims that after the plaintiff’s team successfully completed an assignment to perform about 100 hours of coding over four days, the only reward for working through the nights was a call to berate them for causing the rush — a rush that management imposed upon them — through poor planning.
By early 2025, plaintiff says the environment had taken a tangible physical toll. She was vomiting in the mornings, unable to sleep, and suffered severe stomach pain. Between January and September 2025, she claims she raised these issues with her direct supervisor on at least four separate occasions, explicitly connecting her health problems to the workplace. On September 10, 2025, Carter’s physician told her she needed to immediately reduce her stress levels and mandated a medical leave of absence. She applied for and was granted short-term disability leave through October 6, 2025.
When she returned to work on October 6, the complaint alleges that her supervisor’s demeanor was “dramatically and immediately different,” and Carter’s work scope shrunk to just two projects. This effectively stripped her of approximately 85 percent of her job responsibilities.
Then, 32 days after her return, Carter received a Teams call invite. Nothing good ever happens over Teams, and this was no exception. An HR rep informed Carter that her “position has been eliminated.” A lawyer trying to avoid litigation might’ve suggested waiting at least more than a month before putting the firm in a position that looks so retaliatory.
When reached for comment, the firm replied that “the firm does not comment on personnel matters.” The lack of comment isn’t surprising, though personally I’d placed my money on the firm citing ongoing litigation as opposed to “personnel matters.” Once there’s a federal lawsuit, it feels like it’s grown a bit beyond a mere personnel matter.
HRD, a human resources publication, put it this way:
For HR teams, the sequence here is hard to look away from. An employee raises health concerns tied to the workplace multiple times. Management acknowledges but does not act. The employee takes approved leave. She returns to a sharply reduced role. Weeks later, she is gone. That is the kind of chain of events that draws legal attention — and the kind that better internal processes might have interrupted well before it reached a courtroom.
This also isn’t K&L Gates’s first rodeo with ADA claims. Back in 2020, another Pittsburgh-based employee — a data specialist named Frank Krastman — sued the firm under the ADA after alleging he was fired for requesting disability accommodations related to anxiety and ADHD.
No one will confuse Biglaw with a warm and fuzzy environment. The work is high-impact and the deadlines are tight. In an industry that is — for now — denominated in time, every level of the firm finds itself stressed. But just because Biglaw is a pressure cooker doesn’t mean the staff has to contend with physical illness brought on by the job.
(The complaint in Carter v. K&L Gates LLP, No. 2:26-cv-00577 is on the next page…)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Biglaw Firm Sued For Firing Staffer A Month After Returning From Disability appeared first on Above the Law.
