She does not name her employer as a defendant in the complaint which is linked in the link in the OP. Here it is:
https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/pdfserver/7FNAM7Q/57320424/Wyche__nyedce-16-03029__0001.0.pdf
Calmom, we have a blind legislator who graduated from Yale law school and went on to have a great career (he is licensed to practice law in WA):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Habib
Quite an amazing biography!
I don’t see how it could be actionable for a law firm to require its lawyers to practice law. It’s kind of a historical gentleman’s agreement to give people two tries. You’ll be paid around $100,000 in the time it takes to fail twice, while in the meantime the firm can’t bill you out as a lawyer. The law firm takes all the risk; it’s a great deal for the associate.
Right, Hanna, I agree. My point earlier was more of a theoretical point – her claim against the bar requires her to prove that she was a star associate at Ropes because it is only the stars who stick around for more than a few years anyway. If she truly was a star, and the law firm really wanted her, they could figure out a way to re-hire her after she passed the bar.
If truly the ONLY reason they didn’t rehire her was because she had some disability that prevented her from taking the bar, then as a theoretical matter, the decision not to rehire her after she passed the bar would arguably be discrimination based on her disability. But I absolutely fo not believe that was the case here , because I don’t believe that she was the star associate who was one of the few who would have made partner, and I believe that discrimination based on cognitive ability by law firms is just fine.
I’m not making my point very clearly. Her claim is ironic because she is essentially is saying that the discrimination by the bar harmed her by subjecting her to downstream discrimination by law firms. It’s just a weird claim, is all I am trying to say.
Let’s say she was in a wheel chair and could not access the test site, and had to fight for a year to gain access to the test site. If she had been a star associate at the law firm, and the law firm said, we refuse to rehire you because and only because it took you a year to get access to the bar testing site, that sounds like discrimination by the law firm, at least theoretically.
This case is different because the very qualities she lacks ate the key qualities for the job. She is essentially saying your lack of accommodation exposed by cognitive defects to my employer.
Ah, but the thing is, extra time on an artificial standardized test has very little to do with the skill of your doctor practicing. I have several kids, they all got statistically the same score on SATs & APs in HS, but the one with the learning disorder had double time. Had that not happened, that kid would never have had the marks & scores to get into a top undergrad school.
A person in the HS asked my why we did the extra time thing and I explained: the kid has this diagnosed documented issue, most of the time, being a bright kid, she can compensate; however, under artificial unrealistic constraints, she cannot. So, if the measure of success is going to be that artificially designed test & score, I am ok with her having the extra time required.
As I recall, in grades K-12 special accommodations are for people to reach their potential. You have an IQ of 150, but without extra time, you score at the level of an I Q of 100, you get your accommodations. Once out of K-12 the new guideline is whether you perform substantially worse than average. When DD went to University and when she took the MCAT it became obvious that one needed to be physically impaired, like can’t use your hands well or eyes well to get accommodations at her school. I also ran the MCAT standards by the HS district psychologist who said, “don’t bother applying for extra time” & criticized the standard 
I am surprised that the LSAT allows all these accommodations, though it has been over 10 years since we looked at this stuff, perhaps the MCAT offers more now, too.
My DD knew that she would never ace the national standardized tests in med school and residency, but she would study diligently and do well. The tests have nothing to do with her success as a doctor. As a matter of interest, in her first term of med school she found the work much easier than several of her classmates and she even tutored people, because she had learned how she needed to study under pressure years ago. For many of her ‘smart kid’ classmates this was their first experience in not having enough time for it to just come easily to them & it was scary to try to learn at twentysomething how to study hard.
DD chose a field where it’s all about doing, not about sitting & reading & filling in bubbles on a scantron. The MCAT, like the SAT, is more about weeding people out than determining their likely success, I think. There are thousands of med school applications, the schools need a way to winnow down the pile- standardized tests are a method by which they justify cutting people from consideration. Beyond weeding out someone who simply does not have the pure intelligence to handle the work, the result of standardized tests is just ranking people and demarcating a line of pass/fail.
I would be a bit concerned about the inability to think abstractly and some of the other items mentioned for that attorney, but then, the news might not be entirely accurate in their representation of her issues
@somemom But what about a student who does not work well under pressure and has anxiety attacks. Being a doctor can be an incredibly stressful job. Would the hospital have to give the “disabled” doctor longer breaks to cope while patients are filling up the ER?
Taking a test for the purpose of becoming a student who will become a paying customer to a school is not the same thing as taking a test for accreditation for an occupation.where you are going to provide a paid professional service to a customer.
somemom, Big Law practice is all about billing hours, it is all about solving complex, multivariable problems very, very quickly, in 6-minute increments.
No, those issues are listed in her complaint, linked above. It is an interesting read. I feel sorry for her because she did have to deal with serious physical and emotional trauma.
I also feel sorry for her, but the simple fact would appear to be that she no longer has the intellectual capabilities that enabled her to get into Harvard Law, and if she had been in this state starting in, say, middle school, she would never have been admitted. Perhaps she would have been admitted to a lesser school. Lots of law school grads fail the bar, especially in NY. There are law schools across the nation where the rate of passing the bar is abysmal.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to provide software to accommodate people who are, for example, legally blind. it is another thing altogether to accommodate someone who is intellectually incapable.
Time isn’t the issue that struck me. It’s the impairments. Even doing wills & trusts, if you have “a cognitive impairment that makes [you] struggle with complex abstract problems”, you won’t do very well. Clients who hire a firm like Ropes & Gray have very complex and abstract estate planning and tax issues to deal with. How many clients with multi-million dollar estates will trust them to an attorney who “struggles”?
And it’s worse in California according to a couple of relatives and several former colleagues who took both the NY and California Bar exams.
California’s Bar exam is widely regarded as having the hardest bar exam in the nation…partially because of the proliferation of non-ABA law schools* in that state and the need to scrutinize whether they have what it takes to practice.