On Attorneys Fees and Hecker
0 Comments
Permalink |
Honestly, I have spent a week scratching my head, off and on, over the Supreme Court granting cert to consider the standards governing when attorneys fees can be awarded in an ERISA case, particularly when they denied cert shortly thereafter in Hecker, which presented the opportunity to address the much more substantive issue of the scope of fiduciary responsibility for the amount - and corresponding degree of disclosure - of 401(k) fees. In my mind, there is already a conflict among the circuits over that issue, with the Seventh Circuit finding outright that there was no viable theory against fiduciaries of large plans with market standard fees, and the Eighth finding this same theory worthy of factual inquiry. However, as I thought more on it, the denial of cert for Hecker makes some jurisprudential sense. Hecker itself was decided on a motion to dismiss, leaving essentially no factual record for evaluating these types of claims (critics will say, of course, that this didn’t stop the Seventh Circuit from deciding the theory had no merit) and forcing any Supreme Court ruling to turn solely on the allegations in the pleadings. This is a complicated issue, one I have said before would have been more properly evaluated by the Seventh Circuit after factual development, and I suppose it is likewise fair to say that a Supreme Court review of the issues posed by Hecker by means of reviewing Hecker itself would have suffered from the same flaw; Supreme Court review of the fee issues raised by the Hecker line of cases is probably better suited to a case that has played out sufficiently to allow all of the factual and legal fault lines to develop prior to Supreme Court review.
But the attorneys fee case itself still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as a practicing litigator who spends plenty of time with cases pending in the federal courts that are governed by that fee statute. The reality is that such attorney fee awards are either subsumed within settlements, or the courts award them under current standards only, typically, where there is significant merit to a party’s position and the party obtains significant relief; the district court judges, in my experience, do a good job of utilizing the current standards and understanding of the fee shifting provision of the statute to bring about that result, such as in this case here. And at the end of the day, no matter certain peculiarities that exist in the wording of the statute, this is really the only standard for awarding or not awarding fees that makes practical sense in the real world. After all, do we really want attorneys fees awarded for less than obtaining at least a significant portion of the relief sought by a plan participant?
I understand that the Fourth Circuit, in the case under review, applied a somewhat more stringent test than what I am discussing here, but, from a courtroom level view, courts get this issue right often enough that it doesn’t seem to warrant Supreme Court intervention. But the Court seems to have a thing for ERISA cases these days, for whatever reason.
It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word Prevail Is
0 Comments
Permalink |
I have been swamped for awhile, but have wanted to post on this case, by Judge Young of the U.S. District Court here, for almost as long, and I want to get it up today while I have a few minutes of daylight, because I think it is a very important opinion for practitioners. Long time readers will know that I am very fond of federal court decisions that give a scholarly, extensive overview of the case law on both sides of an issue, because it prevents a litigator from having to reinvent the wheel by creating his or her own survey of the law on that particular issue when it comes up in their own practices, since a court has already done it. In this opinion here, Judge Young gives a scholarly overview of the split among the circuits on what it means to be a “prevailing party” entitled to recover attorneys’ fees in an ERISA case. The particular issue before him was whether a participant who does not recover benefits, but instead attains a remand to the administrator for further review has prevailed, for purposes of ERISA’s attorney fee shifting provision. The court’s conclusion, after surveying the cases throughout the country, is: (1) maybe; and (2) sometimes. I am being a bit flippant, but the truth is it is an excellent analysis of an issue you don’t see that often and the court’s conclusion, in a nutshell, is that you have to look and see if the plaintiff, beyond just getting that relief, accomplished some significant goal of the suit; if so, then the plaintiff is a prevailing party entitled to an award of attorney’s fees. It is not a black and white issue, in the sense of remand either always does or always does not warrant such an award, but a fact based one dependent on what was actually accomplished in the lawsuit. For anyone who deals with these issues, it is certainly worth a read. The case is Colby v. Assurant Employee Benefits.
A Thanksgiving Week Feast
0 Comments
Permalink |
Some of the more prolific bloggers manage to be prolific by posting short notes on various topics of interest written by others, which isn’t my usual style. But over the past week or so I have managed to back up a good stack of things that I have wanted to talk about in detail, but haven’t had the time to comment on. So in the spirit of a Thanksgiving host laying out a big spread, here’s a whole bunch of things at once:
First, here is a good follow up story providing more detail on Wal-Mart’s success in defending itself against excessive fee litigation, a topic I first discussed in this post here. This particular story, in PlanAdvisor, does a nice job of illustrating the point I made in my earlier post, which is that the court, in ruling in favor of Wal-Mart, did not focus on or analyze the propriety of the particular fees themselves, but rather focused on the method used by the fiduciary to select the investment options in question and whether that was prudent. Interestingly, the article describes the Wal-Mart investment menu, and it reads like one you would find in just about any 401(k) plan. Does this suggest that most plans are actually fine on this front? Or might it suggest that fiduciaries as a whole accept fees that are too high, and that perhaps comparing a particular plan’s investment choices, such as Wal-Mart’s, against industry benchmarks is not really the right focus for deciding whether the fees in a particular plan were too high? Just asking.
Second, here’s one court’s answer to an oft asked question: is a plan participant seeking benefits entitled to attorney’s fees for the administrative appeal portion of his claim?
Third, here’s an interesting webinar rounding up the Supreme Court’s treatment of ERISA issues during the 2008 term. The Court’s fascination with ERISA during the past year has been well documented and the biggest item of discussion in ERISA related media, and pretty much everything about those developments has been chronicled on this blog and a million other places. But if you haven’t seen it all enough by now, the webinar may be for you. Interestingly, one of the topics noted in the webinar is the Court’s involvement in a case, still pending and not yet decided, concerning waivers by divorcing spouses of plan benefits. This is the quickly becoming infamous Kennedy case, which to date has caught the eye for two reasons: first, many people have some question as to why the Court took on this case and whether it merited the Court’s involvement, and second, because of the Court’s decision to seek supplemental, post-argument briefing on the very basic issue of the extent to which plan administrators are bound - barring an effective QDRO - to the express written terms of a plan. As a very experienced benefits consultant recently commented to me, the Court is going to upturn an awful lot of apple carts if, intentionally or even (probably by accident) implicitly, they indicate that administrators are not strictly controlled by the actual written terms of the plan instrument. As a result, a case that started out as perhaps the least substantively significant of the ERISA cases taken up by the Court in the past year threatens to become one of the more disruptive to settled practices, in a manner similar to how the Court reopened much settled thinking on fiduciary duty issues by indicating in LaRue that rules long established in the defined benefit context may not hold true for all other situations.
Okay, that clears some of the backlog.
LaRue, The Postscript
0 Comments
Permalink |
Remember the grave concern in different quarters about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue would lead to a flood of litigation? Turns out it didn’t even do so in the LaRue case itself, which, now on remand at the trial court level, has been voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff to avoid the expense of litigating the case. There’s your real check on excessive litigation: the costs of pursuing them. While ERISA grants a prevailing party the right to recover attorney’s fees, it is not a given that they will be awarded, particularly in a case, such as LaRue, where - as the multiplicity of opinions at the Supreme Court make clear - the law governing the issues in dispute is unsettled. Moreover, they are only awarded if you win; litigating a questionable case at significant expense risks large attorney’s fees that may never be recouped.
Of course, I guess all of this is just a back door argument for the outcome suggested by the opinion in Bendaoud discussed here: that the LaRue type cases are better structured as class actions than individual actions, for a variety of reasons, apparently including that litigating one small case is just plain not cost effective.
Does David Have to Pay Goliath if the Slingshot Misses Its Mark?
0 Comments
Permalink |
Fee shifting provisions, such as the one in the ERISA statute, that authorize a court to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing party, are facially neutral, and allow for an award in favor of the prevailing party, whomever that may be, and against the losing party, again whomever that may be. But should attorney’s fees be awarded to a large plan or administrator, such as a multimillion or billion dollar pension plan, from a plan participant who has lost a case seeking benefits that he or she believed was owed under the plan’s terms? In essence, does a facially neutral fee shifting statute really require David to pay Goliath?
The elements that are to be considered in ruling on an award of attorney’s fees under ERISA are, like the statute’s fee shifting provision itself, facially neutral; they do not presuppose that any particular type of party is more or less entitled to an award of attorney’s fees than any other party, nor that any particular type of party is entitled to protection against being hit with such an award. But the devil, as always, is in the details or, perhaps more accurately when, as in this case, broad open ended standards in the law are applied to a particular case, in the application of the standard to the concrete facts before the court. And as this case here, and Roy Harmon’s discussion of it shows, the application of those elements to this type of scenario tends to end up with a finding that the individual plan participant who has lost a case against a large plan does not have to pay attorney’s fees to the prevailing defendant.
Seldom Seen: Awarding Attorney's Fees Under ERISA to a Prevailing Defendant
0 Comments
Permalink |
This is something you don’t see every day, namely an award of significant attorney’s fees to the prevailing defendant in an ERISA governed action. In R.I. Carpenters Annuity Fund v. Trevi Icos Corp., just decided by the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island (but not yet up on its website), the court entered such an award against the losing plaintiff, a union provided employee benefit plan, on a claim brought by it under ERISA, even though the court acknowledged that ERISA’s fee shifting provisions are seldom used to require a losing plaintiff to pay attorney’s fees to a prevailing defendant. Here, however, the plaintiff had used ERISA as an alternative mechanism for litigating a jurisdictional dispute with another union over a project, apparently for tactical reasons related to adverse rulings against it before the National Labor Relations Board in other, similar circumstances. The court provides a nice review of the factors in the First Circuit that govern the decision whether to award attorney’s fees to a prevailing party, and noted that the key issue in the case before it was whether the plaintiff’s decision to use ERISA as a tactical tool for litigation strategy constituted a misuse of the statute, warranting an award of attorney’s fees in favor of the prevailing defendant. The court explained:The Court should consider five factors in deciding whether to award fees and costs to a party: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions. Cottrill v. Sparrow, Johnson & Ursillo, Inc., 100 F.3d 220, 225 (1st Cir. 1996); see also Beauvais v. Citizens Fin. Group, Inc., 418 F. Supp. 2d 22, 33 (D.R.I. 2006). These so-called Cottrill factors are guidelines and do not preclude the Court from consideration of other factors. Cook, 334 F.3d at 124. Rather, the Court may - and should - consider "additional criteria that seem apropos." Cottrill, 100 F.3d at 225. Ultimately, the test for granting or denying attorney's fees and costs in an ERISA case is, in a word, "flexible." Id.; see also Gray v. New England Tel. & Tel. Co., 792 F.2d 251, 258 (1st Cir. 1986).ERISA's broad language permits the Court to award fees and costs to "either" party. However, the substantive purpose of ERISA is remedial, i.e., it is designed to protect "the interests of participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries." 29 U.S.C. § 1001(b). Consequently, some courts have noted that fees or costs seldom should be assessed against unsuccessful ERISA plaintiffs. See, e.g., Operating Eng'rs Pension Trust v. Gilliam, 737 F.2d 1501, 1505-06 (9th Cir. 1984); Marquardt v. N. Am. Car Corp., 652 F.2d 715, 719-20 (7th Cir. 1981). Before the Court tackles the individual Cottrill factors it should be noted that this is not a typical ERISA case. As was discussed in the Court's decision denying summary judgment, the driving force behind this action seems to be a jurisdictional dispute between two labor unions -- the Carpenters Union Local 94 and the Laborers Union, both of which claimed the right to represent the workers on the "front-end" of the CM-120. R. I. Carpenters Annuity Fund v. Trevi Icos Corp., 474 F. Supp. 2d 326, 331 (D.R.I. 2007). Whether fees should be awarded turns on the question of whether it is appropriate to use ERISA litigation as a vehicle to pursue Local 94's claim of jurisdiction. If it is legitimate to use ERISA in this way, then even an unsuccessful Plaintiff might not be "culpable" under the Cottrill factors. If it is not, then to use ERISA this way (at the expense of an innocent employer) more likely evidences culpability under the Cottrill analysis.
The court then concluded that the plaintiff’s strategic use of ERISA in this manner was not appropriate, and justified an award of attorney’s fees to the defendant.
It is a fascinating decision for at least two reasons. The first is the relative rarity of a court granting attorney’s fees to the prevailing defendant, and the case presents a road map as to one particular line of argument that a defendant can pursue to seek such an award. The second is that the case drives home the need to consider the rationale for including an ERISA claim in a case, and suggests that there are risks to using ERISA in situations where other statutes or theories of liability are better suited to targeting the specific mischief at issue.
The Five Factor Test for Attorney's Fee Awards Under ERISA
0 Comments
Permalink |
Here’s a nice follow up ruling in the case of Curran v Camden National, a particularly interesting ERISA case that I discussed here. In this newest ruling, the United States District Court for the District of Maine denied the motion of the defendant - which had earlier successfully moved to dismiss the complaint against it - for an award of attorney’s fees under ERISA. The Court first stated the governing standard in the First Circuit on this issue, which is that:
in an ERISA case, a prevailing plaintiff does not, merely by prevailing, create a presumption that he or she is entitled to a fee-shifting award [and there is no] creation of a presumption in favor of prevailing defendants. Rather . . . in the context of ERISA cases, the Court is to apply a five-factor analysis to determine the appropriateness of an award of attorney's fees to the prevailing party: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions.
The Court then went step by step through each factor, explaining how none warranted an award of attorney’s fees, despite the fact that the defendant had prevailed on a motion to dismiss - which is always a pretty good showing of a potentially severe absence of merit in the plaintiff’s claims. The Court explained that prevailing on such a motion alone cannot be enough to support an award of attorney’s fees, because if it was, it would discourage parties from proceeding with what may well be meritorious claims out of fear of being hit with an award of attorney’s fees if they are wrong in their analysis of the merits. The take home from the opinion in this case can only be that the standard for obtaining such an award, at least as a prevailing defendant, is pretty high, and if I were defending against a claim for attorney’s fees under ERISA, this is the case I would open my brief with.
Attorney Fee Awards in Insurance Coverage Litigation
1 Comments
Permalink |
When I was first starting out as a lawyer, stuck with research assignments that required figuring out all aspects of a particular state's law on a particular issue, I always liked to begin by looking for a federal district court decision on the subject, because the federal court decisions had a tendency to include a comprehensive summary of all the law in the state in question on the issue in dispute. This saved the work of reviewing multiple state court decisions, each of which tended to address only one narrow part of the overall issue without discussing other state court decisions that addressed other aspects of the issue. I have always attributed this, by the way, to the federal courts' greater access to law clerks, who could be counted on to turn opinions into minor treatises.
Anyway, here is a perfect example of this phenomenon, only here on an issue that matters to this blog: namely, when can an insured obtain recovery of attorneys fees under Massachusetts law from an insurer in a lawsuit over coverage. Massachusetts state court decisions establish that coverage litigation is an exception, at least here, to the American rule, and that in Massachusetts, it is loser pays, at least if the insurer is the loser in the case.
But the Massachusetts state court decisions to this effect are spread across several cases and could arguably be limited to their facts, unless you synthesize them and push their reasoning one step further. The federal district court in Massachusetts has taken this last step for us, reviewing the Massachusetts state court decisions on this issue and concluding that they add up to an insured being entitled to recover the attorneys fees it incurs in establishing either a duty to defend or a duty to indemnify on the part of the insurer, without limitation to whether the policy in question provides first party or instead third party coverage.
Attorney Fee Awards in the First Circuit
0 Comments
Permalink |
There was another important issue addressed in the First Circuit's decision this month in Janeiro, one I had planned to address in a return post on the case, involving an issue dear to the hearts of anyone who sues plans, administrators or fiduciaries for a living, namely the right to recover attorneys' fees in such a lawsuit. Before I could return to this point, however, I got sidetracked by my favorite decision of the month, Abatie v. Alta Health and Life Insurance. So I am returning to it now, before this point can get shunted to the side again by some other new development.
In Janeiro, you may recall, the defendant took a beating in the case, and the plaintiff, rightfully so under ERISA, sought to recover attorneys' fees after prevailing on his claim. The First Circuit, addressing the district court's decision not to award fees to the prevailing plaintiff, gave a nice, concise presentation of the law at this point in time in this circuit on this issue. Emphasizing that an award of attorneys' fees in such cases is entirely discretionary, the court discussed the standards governing this determination in this circuit. In key part, the court declared:
ERISA provides that attorneys' fees are available in the court's discretion. . . . We begin by noting that in an ERISA case, a prevailing plaintiff does not, merely by prevailing, create a presumption that he or she is entitled to a fee-shifting award.. . . [T]his court has listed five factors that ordinarily should guide the district court's analysis: (1) the degree of culpability or bad faith attributable to the losing party; (2) the depth of the losing party's pocket, i.e., his or her capacity to pay an award; (3) the extent (if at all) to which such an award would deter other persons acting under similar circumstances; (4) the benefit (if any) that the successful suit confers on plan participants or beneficiaries generally; and (5) the relative merit of the parties' positions. . . .This list is illustrative, not exhaustive[;]no single factor is dispositive; and indeed, not every factor in the list must be considered in every case.
The First Circuit approved of the district court's analysis of this issue, and in so doing presented the model for how to address this issue. It is fact specific, and the way to argue it to the court, and for the court to in turn consider the issue, is to address what the actual facts of the matter show on that specific case with regard to each of the five factors (recognizing, of course, that the First Circuit specifically left open the possibility that there are still more factors that could possibly be considered, and that even some of the factors specifically identified by the court may have no relevance).
How Do You Calculate a Fee Award to a Solo Practitioner?
0 Comments
Permalink |
There is a neat little ERISA decision just out from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the case of James McDonald et al. v. Pension Plan of the NYSA-ILA Pension Trust Fund, et al., http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/ decided on Tuesday, the court addressed the question of determining an appropriate fee award under ERISA for a prevailing plaintiff who was represented by a solo practitioner. Noting that the general rule is that "[i]n calculating attorney's fee awards, district courts use the loadstar method - hours reasonably expended multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate," the court launched into an interesting discussion of how to determine for these purposes the reasonable hourly rate for a solo practitioner. The court rejected the idea that the rate should automatically be lower based on the status of the attorney as a solo practitioner or that otherwise the size of the attorney's firm alone is grounds upon which to set the rate; it is, the court noted, a factor that should go into determining the market against which the reasonable fee should be set, but no more than that. Of even more interest, the court rejected the unique act of trying to set the solo attorney's reasonable hourly fee at what would be an acceptable blended rate in the market, because while larger firms use blended rates to even out the cost to the client across the services of more experienced and less experienced attorneys, this did not actually occur in the case before the court, where the plaintiff was represented by a solo practitioner.
Ringing the bell twice
0 Comments
Permalink |
There is an interesting article concerning the latest developments over the case of Jurinko v. Medical Protective Corp., the largest insurance bad faith verdict in Pennsylvania history, reprinted in Law.com from The Legal Intelligencer, at http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1144330160389. The article concerns the plaintiffs' lawyers attempt to make new law that would increase the attorney's fee award to them as the prevailing plaintiffs in this insurance bad faith case, a case which is nicely summed up in the court's opinion on post trial motions at http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/06d0372p.pdf.
The article points out that fee awards are entirely discretionary under Pennsylvania law, and discusses that the plaintiffs' lawyers are trying to convince the court to vary from the usual application in that jurisdiction of the lodestar method of awarding attorney's fees.
Such an award would not be discretionary in Massachusetts, where General Laws Chapter 93A, which is the operative statute for bringing a bad faith action against an insurer, mandates such awards to plaintiffs. This is entirely consistent with Massachusetts law in general at this point, which essentially provides a carve out for insurance disputes, in most circumstances, from the typical pay your own way rule with regard to attorney's fees. Instead, in this state, if the policyholder or the claimant wins a coverage or bad faith dispute, their attorney's fees typically become the problem of the insurer that ended up on the wrong side of the verdict.