An appeals court has reinstated a disability discrimination lawsuit filed by a court clerk who was terminated three weeks after requesting an accommodation for her social anxiety disorder.

Christina Jacobs, who has suffered from mental illness since childhood, was hired as a court clerk in Superior Court for New Hanover County in Wilmington, North Carolina, in January 2009, according to Thursday’s ruling by the 4th U.S. District Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, in Christina Lynn Jacobs v. N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts et al.

In March 2009, she began training to work at the court’s front counter, but soon began to experience extreme stress, nervousness and panic attacks while at the counter, according to the ruling.

In September 2009, she sent an email to her three immediate supervisors in which she requested an accommodation, specifically that she be trained to fill a different role in the clerk’s office, and perhaps work at the front counter only one day a week.

Three weeks later, she was called into the office of one of her supervisors, where she saw a copy of her email on the desk, according to the ruling. She was then told she was being fired because she was not “getting it.”

Ms. Jacobs filed suit against the court on charges including disability discrimination, retaliation and failure to accommodate. The U.S. District Court in Wilmington granted the Superior Court’s request for summary judgment dismissing the case, holding that Ms. Jacobs was not disabled as a matter of law, and that there was no evidence on record to indicate the supervisor knew of her request for accommodation.

A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit unanimously reinstated the case. “Strikingly, both of the district court’s key factual findings … rest on factual inferences contrary to Jacobs’s competent evidence.

“The district court thus improperly resolved factual issues at the summary judgment stage, in contravention to well-settled law,” said the ruling in remanding the case for further action.