EDWARD J. DAVILA, District Judge.
On August 5, 2014, this court issued a Case Management Order ("CMO") which, inter alia, provided a deadline by which the parties could amend their pleadings according to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15.
IBM eventually moved for summary judgment on all claims. This court granted that motion in part, but denied it with respect to two claims: the second claim for failure to engage in a timely, good faith interactive process and the third claim for failure to provide a disability accommodation. As noted, Plaintiff stated during discovery that these two claims were based on the allegations that IBM took an "inordinately long time" to approve his accommodation requests and that his request for ergonomic furniture was "never fulfilled" or "never set up." Nothing more.
At the Final Pretrial Conference on December 17, 2015, Plaintiff made an oral motion for leave to amend his complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15 in order to assert that, in addition to those allegations previously disclosed, IBM failed to accommodate his disability and failed to engage in the interactive process by not offering him disability benefits. IBM opposed the motion, and the court indicated it would deny it. The court has now thoroughly examined this issue and found no basis to modify its oral ruling. Accordingly, Plaintiff's motion will be denied, again, for the reasons explained below.
At the outset, the court must first frame the issue before it. Though Plaintiff's counsel referenced Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15 during argument, Plaintiff's request for leave to amend is unquestionably governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16 and properly construed as a motion to amend the CMO.
Here, Plaintiff has not established good cause to amend the scheduling order to allow for an amendment to the complaint. This is so because Plaintiff did not reasonably explain why he failed to disclose sooner that his remaining claims were based in part on disability benefits as a potential accommodation. Such an explanation is especially important for the establishment of good cause for three important reasons. First, contrary to the representations of Plaintiff's counsel at the hearing, it is not apparent from either the complaint or Plaintiff's interrogatory responses that his disability accommodation and engagement claims ever contemplated potential disability benefits as a possible accommodation. Second, Plaintiff cannot deny he was aware of potential issues related to short-term disability benefits, given the fact he based another of his claims on those very same benefits; in other words, the availability of disability benefits is not something Plaintiff recently discovered. Third, the nature of Plaintiff's claims required him to identify, during this litigation and at some time prior to the eve of trial, the possible accommodations that would have been available during the interactive process.
Under these circumstances, where Plaintiff was aware of a possible theory but failed to timely raise it or alternatively provide a good reason for not doing so, the court is unable to find that Plaintiff acted with diligence.
Thus, for the purposes of clarity, the court emphasizes that the subject of the currently-scheduled trial is two claims: (1) Plaintiff's second claim for failure to engage in a timely, good faith interactive process, and (2) Plaintiff's third claim for failure to provide a disability accommodation. Within neither of these two claims may Plaintiff assert a theory based on the loss of disability benefits as a potential accommodation.
Based on the foregoing, Plaintiff's oral motion for leave to amend the complaint is DENIED. With that, there is no basis to revisit the in limine rulings. Plaintiff's oral motion for reconsideration is also DENIED.