Stage-4 Cancer Survivor Wins $3.26 Million After Being Fired Two Days After Asking to Work From Home
Won by Schroeter Goldmark & Bender.
A King County jury awarded $3,263,230 to Linda O'Brien, a stage-4 breast cancer survivor who was fired by her dental-clinic employer two days after requesting to work from home while contagious with shingles.
What happened
Linda O'Brien was working as a financial coordinator for Orthodontic Excellence, a group of orthodontic and dental clinics across western Washington owned by Dr. Mahadeep Virk and Helena Skountrianos, when she received a breast cancer diagnosis in May 2019. Two months later her oncologist confirmed the cancer was stage 4. Her doctors told her she could continue working full-time through treatment, and she did.
As her immune system weakened from chemotherapy, O'Brien contracted shingles in October 2019. Shingles is contagious, and one of her colleagues was pregnant. O'Brien asked her employers if she could work from home until she recovered, a modest accommodation to protect a co-worker at heightened risk. Two days later, Virk and Skountrianos fired her.
O'Brien brought claims in King County Superior Court for disability discrimination, failure to reasonably accommodate a disabled employee, and retaliation, all under Washington law. At trial, attorneys Elizabeth Hanley and Joe Solseng of Schroeter Goldmark and Bender presented the sequence of events to the jury: a long-tenured employee, a documented disability, a simple accommodation request, and a termination that followed within 48 hours. The defendants disputed the framing, but the jury found the employers' conduct unlawful across all three theories of liability, holding Virk, Skountrianos, and their related business entities jointly responsible.
In May 2023 the jury returned a 10-to-2 verdict and awarded O'Brien $3,263,230 in total damages. No post-verdict reduction has been reported in public records or press coverage.
After the verdict O'Brien spoke publicly about her decision to pursue the case: 'I couldn't sit by and let somebody treat me as if I didn't matter because I do matter. We all matter.'
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Schroeter Goldmark & Bender
All Schroeter Goldmark & Bender proven verdicts →A King County jury awarded Sherrie Holdsworth $16,674,097 against Scapa Waycross after her husband Kevan, a Camas paper mill worker, died of mesothelioma caused by the company's asbestos-containing dryer felts, the largest asbestos verdict in King County history.
The family of Jackson Reavis, 22, killed at a Wedgwood intersection Seattle knew was dangerous, settled with the City for $6.5 million after evidence showed the City had already allocated funding for protective left-turn signals but abandoned the project before the fatal crash.
The family of Giovonn Joseph-McDade, an unarmed 20-year-old Black man shot and killed by a Kent Police officer in 2017 following a traffic stop for expired registration, settled their federal civil-rights and wrongful-death lawsuit against the City of Kent for $4.4 million in April 2021.
A Multnomah County jury found the Oregon Department of Human Services liable for a child's catastrophic brain injury after a hospital's hotline report of suspected abuse was mishandled and the child was returned home, where he suffered suboxone poisoning and severe abuse nine days later, awarding $29 million that Oregon's tort claims cap reduces to $4.2 million.
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An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.
On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.
The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.