Boston ERISA Law Blog

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans
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Nothing shows up in my practice any more frequently, particularly in this economy and over the last couple of years, than severance packages, and the question of whether a particular severance package program is governed by ERISA. Roy Hoskins, on the ERISABoard.com site, reviews this issue, and its application by the District of Maine under First Circuit law, in this excellent post, along with providing a copy of the opinion by the court. For those of you who may not be able to access the Board’s site for any reason, here is a copy of the decision itself, which is Sawyer v. TD Bank US Holding Company.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans
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I always wondered what benefits whiz Adam Pozek did on Sundays, and now I know - he writes excellent blog posts on 403(b) plans, like this one right here! My own experience with such plans has concerned disputes over them, but Adam provides an interesting overview of the regulatory structure of the 403(b) plan as a whole.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Pensions , Standard of Review
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Here’s a nice little story on Conkright, and the new Supreme Court session. As the article explains in a nutshell:

The issue in Conkright vs. Frommert involves how much deference a court must give to an ERISA plan administrator's interpretation of the terms of the plan. A group of Xerox Corp. retirees who left and then returned before retiring brought the suit. At issue is the method of accounting for lump sum distributions received by the employees when they first left the company when determining the benefits to which they were entitled at retirement.

In a review of the case, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that a district court has no obligation to defer to a plan administrator's reasonable interpretation of the plan's terms if the administrator arrived at the conclusion outside the context of an administrative claim for benefits. It also held that a district court has “allowable discretion” to adopt any “reasonable” interpretation of the retirement plan terms under certain circumstances. The high court has not set a date for oral arguments.

I studiously ignored Conkright during the cert phase - we will discuss it in detail in future posts, however. Gut instinct right now, based only on what the Court did with its most recent ERISA cases? Expect a decision that narrows the administrator’s discretion and gives more freedom of interpretation to the court.  How's that for instant analysis?

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries
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Hecker is the gift that keeps on giving, for either an academic or a blogger (or perhaps a blogger with an academic frame of mind). It presents a wealth of issues warranting further consideration, running from those commented on in my prior posts on the Seventh Circuit’s decision, to one I haven’t even passed on yet, namely the propriety from a jurisprudential perspective of using every trick in the trade, as the Seventh Circuit did, to go outside the complaint for extensive evidence that would allow the case to be decided on a motion to dismiss. It is fair to say that the circuit’s heavy reliance on those maneuvers (and I don’t criticize those tactics in general, as they are a litigator’s stock in trade in presenting motions to dismiss and I am one of those who thinks that, used properly, they provide an opportunity to focus a court on issues that should be decided in a lawsuit at the earliest stage possible) renders the opinion more akin to a law review article that now has the force of law - at least in the Seventh Circuit - than the type of factually based analysis that we normally think of with regard to a binding judicial opinion.

But that’s a topic for another day. What I wanted to pass along today was this excellent article - quoting yours truly extensively, although that’s not what makes it excellent - in InsideCounsel magazine this month on the Hecker decision. It is a well written, interesting report on the case, but I wanted to focus on what I am quoted on at the closing of the article, in which the author writes:

"Hecker is almost a quintessential law and economics opinion. It assumes the 401(k) plan included funds that charged the same [fees] as the market as a whole, and that’s all we need to know," Rosenberg says. "I would be surprised if many other courts are willing to just stop their analysis at that point."

Although Hecker provides a lot of protection for companies, he advises general counsel to assume the decision is just a baseline for ERISA compliance.

"Hecker didn’t impose a very high standard," he says. "Far and below Hecker is going to get you in a lot of trouble in a lot of different jurisdictions."

The defense bar, of which 80% of the time I am one, is very pleased with the decision and thinks it protects and/or validates much of what plans have done when it comes to fees in 401(k) plans. I am not so sure, and I think that prospectively at least it warrants more vigilance from plan sponsors, not less. To my mind, everything follows economics, whether its fashion, car design, house sizes (think McMansions), the social propriety of using company jets and, yes indeed, legal regimes. I have little doubt that with the baby boomer generation looking at becoming the first cohort to both lack pensions and have battered 401(k)s, the economic impact will eventually increase the level of performance and fiduciary expertise demanded of plan sponsors and those they select to run their 401(k) plans. It might take one year, it might take ten years, and I don’t know if it will come about by new regulation, statutory enaction or the development of case law, but it will happen.

Prospectively, as a result, plan sponsors and other fiduciaries can and should assume that, down the road, there will be much tougher looks taken at their 401(k) plans on issues such as fees than the very deferential approach taken by the Seventh Circuit in Hecker; when that comes to pass, they will have been much better off having understood Hecker as presenting only the base minimum standard for the plans they operated, and having targeted a much higher level of participant protection in building their plans than Hecker seemed to them, today, to have required. After all, if you think about it, what really is so hard about looking closely at fees as part of putting together a 401(k) plan’s investment options from here forward, and documenting that this was undertaken, as an additional step in defensive lawyering and plan building, rather than just stopping at the Hecker level of analysis and conduct? It doesn’t take all that much - there are independent fiduciaries out there right now who will try to do it for you - but the legal protection in the long run, and the participant goodwill in the short run, that it will buy far outweighs the costs.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans
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Readers of this blog have undoubtedly picked up on the fact that I like to litigate cases (even more to try them), and that the focus of my practice, including with regard to ERISA governed plans, is litigating disputes. But there are probably far more benefit plan attorneys whose focus is on keeping people out of litigation in the first place, by keeping plans and their operations in line with statutory and regulatory mandates. I just recently came across an excellent new blog both by and for exactly those lawyers, and you can find it right here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans
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If it’s a pleasure to read a piece by someone who gets it, whatever the it may be, it’s even better when that same person can explain it successfully to others. In this case the “it” is how in-house counsel responsible for ERISA governed benefit plans should conduct their oversight of the plans, and the someone is American Airlines’ Vicki D. Blanton, who has that exact responsibility at her company. She has written an excellent “how to” piece for in-house counsel who are charged with those responsibilities, and you can find it right here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans
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A lot of interesting things have piled up in my in-box during the past week and a half or so, when I have not had time to blog. I still think they are interesting, even after a few days of having them underfoot, so I am going to try to parcel out as many of them as possible over the course of this week, until I have either run out of them or out of time, whichever comes first.

I thought, for reasons of both vanity and timeliness, I would start with a couple of items on the Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. DuPont. I am quoted in an article in the current edition of Lawyers USA discussing the case, along with a motley assortment of worthies, including the law professor formerly known as the Workplace Prof. It’s a good article, and for those of you who are subscribers, you can find it here; for those of you who aren’t, I am going to pass on my usual approach of (by putting on my copyright litigator hat) deciding how much of it I can quote under the guise of fair use, and instead send you to my post on the case here, which says pretty much what I think on the subject.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that attorney Albert Feuer was kind enough to send along to me links to a series of papers and commentaries he has written on the Kennedy decision and the issues it raises (and, in many cases, does not answer, in both my and Albert’s views).  You can find them here, here and here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans
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Sorry, couldn’t resist - Bill being William Kennedy and Liv Kennedy being the named beneficiary in yesterday’s Supreme Court opinion, Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan. After reading the opinion itself last night, I thought I would add a couple of comments to my initial impressions of the opinion, which I discussed in yesterday’s post. Initially, from a practical perspective for plan administrators, drafters, sponsors, and the like, the opinion is exactly what it should have been and, in fact, had to have been. I was chatting with a veteran benefits consultant who services retirement plans a while back about this case while it was still pending before the Supreme Court, and he commented that anything other than a clear pronouncement that administrators are to follow the express terms of the plan, rather than have to go outside the plan and weigh the implications of external events such as a divorce proceeding, would create a terribly chaotic situation. The Supreme Court could not have been more clear in its opinion that it was rejecting that possibility, repetitively reinforcing the idea that administrators act properly by relying on the plan documents; indeed, the ruling really required reciting this idea only once, but instead the Court built a long opinion around the repeated reinforcement of that idea.

Second, I noted yesterday that I wouldn’t have minded some clearer guidance on QDROs as part of the opinion, and on close review of the opinion I think we got some, although not explicitly. The Court, rightfully so, emphasized that the QDRO is the one time that an administrator faced with the divorcing participant and designated beneficiary scenario must incorporate court rulings outside the plan documents into the administrator’s application of the plan terms to determine to whom benefits must be paid. What has been more of an issue in practicality, in the courtrooms of the federal district courts, is to what extent a particular court order must perfectly comply with the statute’s QDRO requirements to be a binding QDRO for purposes of ERISA; many court decisions treat divorce decrees that are close enough to meeting the requirements as QDROs, even if they do not meet each and every statutory requirement perfectly, so long as there is enough there to convince a court that the participant and the ex-spouse intended for the ex-spouse to no longer be the beneficiary.

I would argue that the Supreme Court’s discussion at page 16 of the opinion, read in conjunction with footnote 12, indicates that the QDRO requirements must be perfectly matched by a probate court order for such an order to qualify as a QDRO, and that close - even if good enough for horseshoes - is not good enough for qualifying as a QDRO that would trump a beneficiary designation under a plan’s express terms. Why do I say this? In describing QDROs as the one exception to the Court’s preferred ideal of the administrator not having to go outside the plan documents to decide cases such as this one, the Court explained that QDROs require a “relatively discrete” inquiry that is based on a specific “statutory checklist” that “spare[s] an administrator from litigation-fomenting ambiguities.” The Court then proceeded to list the exact statutory requirements that must be satisfied for a divorce order to qualify as a QDRO. If, as lower courts sometimes appear to believe, close is good enough to qualify as a QDRO, then the issue is not a discrete, precise inquiry - as the Court depicts the QDRO inquiry - and is, contrary to the Court’s interpretation of the QDRO requirements, one that leaves, rather than spares an administrator from, “litigation-fomenting ambiguities” over the question. Indeed, while a plan administrator can make its own call on whether an order is a QDRO if the exact, specific statutory requirements must be satisfied for a particular order presented to the administrator in a particular claim to qualify, this isn’t easily done if something less than complete compliance with the statutory formalities can be sufficient to qualify as a QDRO. In that latter circumstance, whether the order is close enough to qualify is in the eye of the beholder, and you can be certain that the party that didn’t get the proceeds based on the administrator’s judgment call on this issue will sue over the question.
 

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans
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Here’s the early word on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan, which revolved around the issue of divorce decrees, the QDRO requirements of ERISA, and whether - in the absence of a valid QDRO - a plan administrator can rightly just pay proceeds to an ex-spouse of a plan participant if the participant never removed the ex as a beneficiary. I have only read this analysis of the case from SCOTUS blog (I will read the opinion itself tonight), but the answer appears to be the same as what most of us have always assumed to be the case: that in the absence of a probate court order that satisfies the statutory requirements in a particular circuit for constituting a QDRO, the money gets paid as per the express terms of the plan itself and any existing beneficiary designation, without regard to any extrinsic divorce agreement that might have mandated otherwise.

Simple enough, although in at least some circuits there is some ambiguity as to exactly what constitutes a QDRO, for instance in how closely the statutory requirements must be complied with. Perhaps the opinion, once I look at it, will shed some light on this question as well.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans
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I like when you sort of hit the zeitgeist in things you write and talk about. I mentioned in a post last week that I would be presenting a seminar to the ASPPA Benefits Council of New England on current trends in ERISA litigation, and I presented the seminar yesterday. As I gave the talk, a theme unfolded: namely, that the confluence of economic problems and the unsettling of many apple carts when it comes to the rules governing ERISA related litigation (a perfect case in point being the majority’s suggestion in LaRue that litigants and lower courts should feel free to reconsider precedents established in defined benefit cases when confronting disputes over defined contribution plans such as 401(k) plans) means we are looking at an expansion of litigation, perhaps in the overall number of suits and, if not, at least in the complexity, dollar value and expense of the suits that are brought. I noted this to be a particular issue with regard to stock drop and excessive fee cases, particularly in the current stock market meltdown.

Well, lo and behold, today here comes this report, from Seyfarth Shaw by means of Global Pension:

The Seyfarth Shaw Workplace Class Action Litigation Report showed last year, the top ten settlements for Employee Retirement Income Security Act-related (ERISA) class action cases topped US$17.7bn, a dramatic increase from the $1.8bn paid out in 2007 . . .“There is an explosion in class action and collective action litigation involving workplace issues. The present downturn in the economic climate is likely to fuel even more lawsuits, and the financial risks in this type of employment litigation can be enormous . . .” The firm said this trend was likely to continue, with particular reference to cases being brought over “stock drop” complaints – in which ERISA plan members brought action over the availability of employer’s equities as an investment option and “plan administration” cases, whereby participants brought action over ‘excessive’ advisory fees and other elements of plan administration.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans
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Cool, what a nice treat to me for the first real workday of the New Year. I have always wanted a reason to link to the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance blog because, well, it just sounds so impressive (that plus it’s a really good read on all things corporate), and one of their contributors handed me the opportunity over the weekend. In a post addressing SEC requirements for online posting of public company proxy materials, the author - a Gibson Dunn partner and visiting professor at Georgetown - points out how these requirements differ from the notice requirements under ERISA:

Compliance with notice and access [rules under the SEC requirements] is not likely to satisfy the requirements for electronic delivery of materials under the U.S. Department of Labor standards for participants in ERISA-covered defined contribution plans, such as 401(k) plans and employee stock ownership plans. Section 404(c) of ERISA permits electronic delivery only if a participating employee has the ability to effectively access documents furnished in electronic form at any location where the participant is reasonably expected to perform his or her duties as an employee and for whom access to the employer’s information system is an integral part of the employee’s duties (e.g., a networked desktop computer at work), or if the employee provides written consent accepting delivery of information electronically. As a result, although an issuer may rely on notice and access for permitted employees and consenting employees, other employee participants should receive paper delivery of proxy materials.

You know what’s interesting about this? The focus on procedural aspects of providing information to plan participants (and others, with regard to the SEC rules). We could use an equal level of attention and agreement when it comes to the amount, type and transparency of the information provided to plan participants in particular, something more important than just the formal procedures by which it is provided.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries
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This really isn’t an instance of logrolling (or blogrolling, as the case may be), I promise, even though Roy Harmon’s post that I am passing along here refers to me and my electronic discovery post a few times; the subject of Roy’s post got my attention and led me to read it long before I realized the peripheral role I played in it.

Roy provides a very erudite discussion of a particular quirk and issue of some real concern in litigating ERISA cases, which is the scope of the attorney client privilege that exists - or often doesn’t - between a plan’s fiduciaries and its legal counsel, when engaged in a dispute with a plan participant. As Roy details, there often is no privilege in that situation that would prevent disclosure to the plan participant of legal advice obtained by the plan fiduciary. Its an interesting problem, one that arises in everything from determining the contents of an administrative record to be produced in a benefits denial case (i.e., is legal advice received by the plan administrator in deciding to deny benefits privileged or not?) to the extent to which the privilege can be raised in defending a deposition in a breach of fiduciary duty case. Roy’s analogy to multi-level chess with regard to these issues is apt, and illustrative of exactly the type of complicated gamesmanship that keeps litigators interested in the otherwise often dull interstices between trials.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , Attorney Fee Awards , Benefit Litigation , ERISA Seminars and other Resources , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries
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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.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans , Summary Plan Descriptions
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Permalink | Judge Gertner of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts has an interesting, if brief, ruling that is just out granting a motion to dismiss a severance pay claim under an ERISA governed plan. What caught my eye about it relates back to this post I wrote a few weeks ago, in which I pointed out the need, in litigation planning and counseling concerning ERISA plans, to resist putting undue emphasis on representations that are inconsistent with the actual terms of a plan, because the courts are likely to ignore such statements and to instead simply enforce what is written in the plan documents. The court’s opinion is another example of the trend in the case law in this direction. Although the court was not delving too deeply into this particular issue, the court noted that “in more recent cases, the First Circuit has held that courts should not look beyond the express terms of an ERISA-regulated plan unless the disputed term is ambiguous,” and that “[i]n ERISA cases . . . the central issue must always be what the plan promised . . . and whether the plan delivered." As I said before, any litigation strategy for an ERISA benefits case has to start with the terms of the plan, and not with extrinsic statements or evidence related to the plan’s terms or interpretation. The case is Walsh v. Bank of America Corporate Severance Program.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries , Retirement Benefits
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Permalink | Very interesting case out of the First Circuit the other day on the question of whether former employees satisfy ERISA standing requirements with regard to defined contribution plans. Short answer is they do, but the Court’s analysis and discussion is an interesting open field run across a range of issues that are both explicit and implicit to any consideration of this question. One particular point, basically noted in a footnote, was of particular interest to me. I have discussed frequently in past posts my thesis that much of the evolution in ERISA law is and will continue to be driven by the economic effect on employees of the replacement of the pension system by 401(k) plans; this is partly because employees have become the persons at risk from investment mistakes, which they generally were not - barring complete failure of the employer and its pension plan - when employees were instead covered by pensions. In an interesting footnote, the Court addresses the distinction between the two types of benefits, and hints at the impact of that difference on employees:

Under a defined benefit plan, participants are typically promised a fixed level of retirement income, computed on the basis of a formula contained in the plan documents. See 29 U.S.C. §1002(35). The formula generally accounts for an employee's years of service and compensation level at retirement. Graden, 496 F.3d at 297 n.10. In contrast with a defined contribution plan, where the amount of benefits is directly related to the investment income earned in an individual account, the investment performance of the portfolio held by a defined benefit plan has no effect on the level of benefits to which a participant is entitled, provided that the plan remains solvent. See LaRue,128 S. Ct. at 1025 ("Misconduct by the administrators of a defined benefit plan will not affect an individual's entitlement to a defined benefit unless it creates or enhances the risk of default by the entire plan.").

The case is Kerr et al. v. W.R. Grace, et al.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans , Summary Plan Descriptions
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Permalink | Rob Hoskins over at the always interesting ERISABoard has an interesting story about a Second Circuit decision that essentially says “too bad” to a plan participant’s waiver/estoppel theory seeking benefits. The story is consistent with what seems to be a trend in which courts frequently fall back to the terms of the actual plan to decide a dispute, and seem unwilling to allow extrinsic, often but not always verbal, representations to participants to vary or even trump the written terms of the plan documents themselves. My own practice when it comes to participants who have been told one thing by a company representative and want to litigate the benefits they are entitled to as a result is to generally say that, yes, we can make that argument, but we will be a lot better off relying on the plan terms themselves and not on any sort of representation that might be to the contrary. It’s a platitude, to a certain extent, I know, but if you start from that premise, you will more often than not get the right strategy when mapping out litigation in cases in which representations were made that may have been contrary to the plan terms. To paraphrase that old handyman saw of “measure twice, cut once,” the way to think about these types of problems is plan terms first, estoppel claims second.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans
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Permalink | By the way, I meant to mention this on Monday, but a million different fires that had to be put out got in the way, so I’ll mention it today instead: Suzanne Wynn’s ERISA carnival from this past weekend surveys and provides links to a truly interesting range of posts on ERISA related issues. I’d recommend taking a few minutes and looking at the posts she collected, many of them from some of the best known, as well as best, ERISA and benefit related bloggers around.

The title of today’s post, by the way, is a deliberate reference to The Band's song from the early 70s.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans , Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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If David Rossmiller can do a potpourri to avoid writing a full fledged blog post then, by gosh, so can I. Conveniently enough, I had some three small items on my mind this morning anyway, all of which I will mention here in one fell swoop:

? More on Bowater: For those of you who were interested in yesterday’s post about the First Circuit’s ruling in Bowater, concerning termination of a benefit plan and a foul up in executing it as part of a corporate acquisition, the ever watchful S.Cotus, who never misses anything on any subject at the First Circuit over at Appellate Law & Practice, has this in-depth review of the Bowater decision. S.Cotus delves into the labor law issues that were also at play in the case, in addition to the ERISA issue that I commented on yesterday. 

? I posted earlier in the week on the question of rising health insurance costs and how that was the elephant in the room that all of these state based attempts to reform health insurance were avoiding, and how that justified the preemption of those state acts in favor of a federalized and consistent nationwide approach to the problem. The Boston Globe has a detailed article today laying out the extent of the increase in health insurance costs just here in Massachusetts. The essence of the article is in the opening paragraph: “Massachusetts health insurers are predicting their rates will increase by about 10 percent next year for most residents covered through employer health plans, marking the eighth consecutive year of double-digit premium hikes.” Funny, but Massachusetts just implemented health reform legislation, so how can this be? The answer, I suspect, is in this post here.

? And finally, on a sillier note, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog is fascinated right now with preemption, posting several times on various applications of the doctrine in the last few days. Yet despite the fixation on preemption, they omit entirely what we all know is the most important and interesting application of preemption, namely ERISA preemption. While I write slightly tounge in cheek on this point, the truth is that, as we see with the attempts of states to legislate health insurance coverage in the face of ERISA preemption, this is in fact the one area of preemption that consistently affects broad numbers of everyday, real life people, as opposed to the smaller subset of directly affected businesses involved in the preemption cases discussed by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog over the last couple of days.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Conflicts of Interest , Employee Benefit Plans
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Permalink | Just a fairly short post on a technical ERISA issue that the First Circuit ruled on a few days ago, namely the steps that have to be followed to terminate or amend a benefit plan, at least with regards to the documentation and formalities needed to do so. In Coffin v. Bowater, Inc., the First Circuit provides a clear and definitive road map to follow to effectuate such a termination, and the court makes clear that veering off of that road map will result in a finding that the benefit plan has not been terminated. While the legal rule itself presented in the case isn’t all that gripping, although it is certainly a technical point that is important to know, the context of the case and some of the discussion in it are interesting in and of themselves, for at least two reasons. The first is the fact pattern of the case itself, which involved the failure of a plan sponsor and an acquiring company to effectively terminate a benefit plan as part of a corporate acquisition, causing them to later have to try to convince a court - unsuccessfully - to create some sort of common law exception to the rules established by the courts and ERISA that would excuse their failure to follow the basic requirements for a plan termination. Its simply interesting to see this important issue poorly executed in a complex corporate transaction, and the end result of litigation and additional liability that results.

The second is that the panel ventures into the question of the standard of review - de novo or arbitrary and capricious - in this circuit with regard to benefit issues and interpretation of plan language. As certain judges of the First Circuit have done in a couple of earlier decisions, this panel suggests that the time may be right for the First Circuit to revisit this question en banc and reset the law in the First Circuit on this issue, although the panel makes clear that doing so is not necessary for purposes of Bowater because the result would be the same under any standard of review that could apply. One wonders how much more pot stirring of this nature on the issue of the standard of review there can be before the circuit chooses a case to fully review and possibly revise the law in this circuit on this issue.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Equitable Relief
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Permalink | Here’s an interesting case out of the First Circuit this week concerning an attempt to use an equitable estoppel theory to force a plan to pay supplemental life insurance benefits even though the former employee covered by the plan had not submitted the necessary health forms to qualify for that coverage. The case, Todisco v. Verizon Communications, involved a situation in which the now deceased employee was supposedly told that he could sign up for the additional life insurance benefits without submitting the necessary health information. The plan administrator refused to pay those benefits after his death because his failure to submit that information precluded such coverage under the terms of the plan.

After much wrangling at the district court (“wrangling” in this context being a euphemism for substantial motion practice), what remained was the plaintiff’s theory that she could recover the benefits on an estoppel theory based on the allegedly misleading statements made to the deceased at the time he elected the benefits. The First Circuit held that the theory failed as a matter of law, however. The Court analyzed the issue under both possible statutory causes of action available to the plaintiff, namely Section 502(a)(1)(B), which “empowers a ‘participant or beneficiary’ to bring suit ‘to recover benefits due to him under the terms of his plan, to enforce his rights under the terms of the plan, or to clarify his rights to future benefits under the terms of the plan,’ and Section 502(a)(3), which “allows a ‘participant, beneficiary, or fiduciary’ to sue ‘(A) to enjoin any act or practice which violates any provision of this subchapter or the terms of the plan, or (B) to obtain other appropriate equitable relief (I) to redress such violations or (ii) to enforce any provisions of this subchapter or the terms of the plan."

The First Circuit held, however, that the plaintiff’s equitable estoppel claim had no home under either statutory section. It found that even though in common parlance equitable estoppel is understood to be an equitable remedy, it did not constitute equitable relief for purposes of ERISA under applicable Supreme Court precedent; for ERISA purposes, equitable relief has a very narrow and specific meaning, and the plaintiff’s attempt to recover compensatory damages only under an estoppel theory did not fit that meaning. The plaintiff’s claim was therefore not actionable as a matter of law under Section 502(a)(3). At the same time, however, the First Circuit found that the relief was not viable as a claim for damages - namely the denied benefits - under Section 502(a)(1)(B), because that section only allows recovery of benefits due under the terms of the plan, and the plaintiff's estoppel theory did not allege that the benefits were due under the actual terms of the plan, but that they were instead due under the terms of the plan as misrepresented to the deceased at the time he sought to obtain the coverage. The Court found that this claim did not fit the express requirements of the statutory provision in question, which limits recovery to benefits when the actual terms of the plan require them to be paid.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Arbitration , Employee Benefit Plans , Health Insurance , Preemption
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Here’s a great story out of Boston, by means of the Workplace Prof, that touches on several obsessions of this blog - ERISA, the federal arbitration act, and court review of arbitration awards. As the Prof explains in this post here, a federal judge for the District of Massachusetts is seeking amicus briefs related to whether or not the court should affirm or instead vacate an arbitrator’s finding that an employer could limit ERISA governed health insurance benefits provided to employees’ spouses only to spouses of the opposite sex. The arbitrator had determined that the benefits were collectively bargained for and that the limitation was appropriate under the collective bargaining agreement.

Now, presumably, the matter is before the District Court here on a motion by the losing party in the arbitration to vacate the award, given that the court is asking for amicus to address the question of whether the arbitration award and the employee benefit plan approved of by the arbitrator violate a clear Massachusetts public policy, given the state’s protection of same sex marriages. The court is inquiring as well into the question of whether that public policy, if it can trump the arbitrator’s award and thereby justify setting aside the arbitration award, is itself trumped by ERISA preemption, with the result, presumably, that the benefits offered by the employer have to be left as is.

There aren’t many states where this issue could really come into play, one would think, although I don’t know how many other states other than Massachusetts allow gay marriage, and thus can have employee spouses who are not of the same sex. Beyond that, the court’s response shows a serious involvement by the court in the question of whether an arbitration award was proper, which I have argued before in this blog is the appropriate approach of a court presented with a challenge to an arbitration award. While one might say the court is really reaching out quite far to address this issue, more than one would normally expect from a district court judge, I will take that any day over the situation I have noted in other posts on this blog, where judges sometimes seems to simply reflexively approve arbitration awards, or at least start with some sort of barely rebuttable presumption that the award should be upheld, both of which are approaches that I do not believe are justified under the Federal Arbitration Act. In addition, it is not particularly out of the norm in this particular federal district to reach out for help from the legal and business community in this way in this type of a case, as I can recall other judges in this district requesting amicus briefs on difficult questions involving the interplay of ERISA and federal or state anti-discrimination laws. Moreover, other judges, as discussed in this post of mine from a little while back, in this district are likewise continuing to struggle with the impact of ERISA on employers as they try to figure out how to structure their employee benefits when it comes to spouses, partners and other dependents, in this brave new world we live in here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Incidentally, the underlying arbitration award is one that I discussed here, in this post, some time ago, in case you want to know more about the underlying controversy.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans , Preemption
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Judge Tauro of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued an interesting opinion this week as to the power, if any, of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to continue to investigate whether an employer, in this instance Partners Healthcare Systems - which operates major teaching hospitals, among other operations - violates state anti-discrimination laws by granting employee benefits to the unmarried partners of employees only in cases of same sex partners and not in cases involving heterosexual unmarried partners. As the court described the facts, Partners Healthcare “offers its employees a variety of health and welfare plans, which it alleges to be regulated by ERISA. Under these plans, [Partners Healthcare] offers employee benefits to unmarried same-sex domestic partners of its employees, but not to unmarried heterosexual domestic partners. . . . [An] employee of [Partners Healthcare] who has a heterosexual domestic partner, filed a charge of discrimination.”

At issue in the court’s opinion was whether the federal court should enter an order barring the state agency from investigating or taking other action against Partners Healthcare for the alleged discrimination on the ground that such state action would be precluded by ERISA preemption; the agency responded that the doctrine of Younger abstention - one of those doctrines that most of us never come across again once we have finished our law school exams - actually precludes the court from intervening with the agency’s investigation, regardless of the possibility of ERISA preemption.

Where did the court come out? It concluded that, in this circuit anyway, abstention is not appropriate where there is a facially conclusive case of preemption under ERISA, and that to the extent the agency is investigating ERISA governed plans offered by Partners Healthcare, the agency is barred from taking action; at the same time, however, the agency was free to proceed with regard to any benefits provided by Partners Healthcare that allegedly discriminate in the manner charged by the complainant where those benefits are not provided under an ERISA governed plan.

Although I admit I have little knowledge of the underlying employee benefit plans at issue, I doubt the ruling leaves much, if any, of the employee benefits offered by Partners Healthcare open to the state agency’s jurisdiction.

The case is Partners Healthcare System v. Sullivan, available right here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Long Term Disability Benefits , Summary Plan Descriptions
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Permalink | The First Circuit issued an opinion in the case of Morales-Alejandro v. Medical Card System on Wednesday. The case, which involved a challenge to a denial of long term disability benefits, is noteworthy for two aspects. The first is that the case reaffirms this circuit’s reluctance to allow discovery beyond production of the administrative record in denial of benefits cases prosecuted under ERISA. The court pointed out that, in this circuit anyway, “ERISA cases are generally decided on the administrative record without discovery, and some very good reason is needed to overcome the presumption that the record on review is limited to the record before the administrator."

The second issue of note is that the court addressed the role of summary plan descriptions in ERISA plans and related litigation, and described the role they should play in a litigated dispute over benefits. In particular, the court declared:  

ERISA imposes an important requirement on plan administrators and insurers to communicate accurately with plan participants and beneficiaries. See Bard, 471 F.3d at 244-45. Part of the communication requirement is that the SPD provide certain information "written in a manner calculated to be understood by the average plan participant, and shall be sufficiently accurate and comprehensive to reasonably apprise such participants and beneficiaries of their rights and obligations under the plan." 29 U.S.C. § 1022(a). Section 1022(b) specifies the information to be included in the summary. When the terms, language, or provisions of the SPD conflict with the plan, the language that the claimant reasonably relied on in making and proving his claim will govern the claim process. Bard, 471 F.3d at 245. The burden is on the claimant to show reasonable reliance and resulting prejudice. Id.

 

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries , Pensions
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Permalink | Here is a terrific and in-depth review of the underlying facts and issues in the pending Supreme Court case of Beck v. Pace International Union, which is scheduled to be argued later this month, and which involves the extent, if any, to which fiduciary obligations apply to a decision to terminate a pension plan by purchasing an annuity rather than by merging the plan into other existing plans. Thanks to Workplace Prof for the heads up about this on-line publication out of the Cornell Law School, a source that I don’t regularly follow (but of course, that is what I rely on the Prof to do, to follow academic sites like that in my stead).

On a side note, one of the things that I simply really enjoy about ERISA is that whenever the Supreme Court weighs in on an ERISA issue, we can look forward to years of - usually conflicting - district court and circuit court decisions trying to apply the Supreme Court’s ruling, giving us great material for litigating cases and for blog discussions.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Pensions
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Permalink | I have written before, including here and here, about the elements that must exist for a particular employment benefit to fall under ERISA and be deemed part of an ERISA governed employee welfare benefit plan. The requirements that must be met can become problematic with small employers, where compensation and benefit packages are often assembled on an ad hoc basis, often vary greatly from one employee to the other, and frequently are not well documented, as I discussed here.

Workplace Prof had another perfect example of this the other day, which the Prof discussed in this post, involving a pension benefit allegedly promised by a small employer that was, in fact, never established by the employer. The Prof points out something that all employees of smaller employers should do, which is make sure to take a gander at the employee benefit documents to make sure they really exist in the expected form; you don’t want to be trying after a particular employee benefit is denied to prove that the elements of an ERISA governed plan existed, and then find out the employer never actually funded the benefit or created any supporting paperwork at all.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans , Long Term Disability Benefits , Pensions , The Hidden Law of ERISA
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I don’t want to turn this blog into a soapbox, and as someone who really likes newspapers, I also don’t want to join the Greek chorus of self-appointed media watchdogs that seems to make up much of the blogosphere. Some things, however, such as this article in the New York Times, call out for a skeptical and critical reaction. The article explains how the NFL has now created a program to provide some funding for long term, home or facility, care for former pro players who “have various forms of dementia,” even though the NFL insists that football injuries to the brain - multiple concussion syndrome, anyone, for those of you who follow the sport? - are not the cause. The article seems to credit the NFL for providing this help to former players - help that, despite the vast wealth of the league, is capped at $88,000 a year - and praises the idea that this problem is being resolved through this program rather than by litigation, i.e. by former players suing the NFL. Astoundingly, the article describes the program as addressing an unmet need because, and I quote the Times here on this, “former players who have dementia do not qualify for the N.F.L.’s disability insurance program, because neither the league nor the union consider their conditions football-related, a stance that has been cast in doubt by several scientific studies.”

And yet, as I discussed in this post several months ago, the family of the late Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster litigated that exact issue for years, finally defeating the NFL, the players association and the plan before the Fourth Circuit court of appeals, to recover benefits under the league’s ERISA governed pension and disability system for exactly this type of injury. The Fourth Circuit’s opinion, in fact, was a pretty powerful condemnation of the roadblocks that had been tossed in Webster and the estate’s path in their attempt to obtain the benefits.

Which brings me to a couple of points that should be kept in mind in reading the Times article and considering the value of the NFL’s new program that the article praises. First, I suspect that the pension plan/disability plan system that the Webster family targeted provides far greater benefits than does this separate plan discussed in the article. If so, the idea that former players should pursue help under that program, rather than through the pension plan, is a disservice to retired players. Second, again if I am right about the greater benefits available under the pension/disability plan, then one has to wonder whether the separate NFL plan discussed in this article, although commendable for providing some help to aging players, actually serves as something of a Trojan horse (not a perfect analogy, I know) that, intentionally or otherwise, draws retired players away from seeking the larger payouts of the pension/disability system and instead to this plan. And third, given that a leading federal court of appeals with a significant track record in ERISA cases has already found that the NFL’s pension and disability plan actually does cover brain injuries of this type, the article is simply off-base in stating that dementia falls outside of the plan.

The article notes the relevance of this issue to some high profile recent players, such as Ted Johnson of the Patriots, 34, whose doctors”said he was exhibiting the depression and memory lapses associated with oncoming Alzheimer’s.” Those players should, notwithstanding this article, first be looking to the NFL’s pension and disability plans, particularly in light of the Fourth Circuit’s ruling in the Webster case, for compensation and care, before settling for the limited assistance provided by this alternative plan.

And finally, this whole matter brings me back to an issue I have talked about in the past, about questionable decision making by courts concerning what decisions to publish and what ones not to publish in the ERISA context. The Fourth Circuit’s decision in the Webster case, to my recollection, was not marked for publication (you can locate it, however, at my earlier post on that case). Yet, really, the scope of NFL plan benefits for this type of mental injury had never been resolved before, and it remains, as this article in the Times reflects, not well understood, making this an opinion that probably should have been published, and should not have been part of what I have called in the past “the hidden law of ERISA.”

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries
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No doubt at least some of you have noticed my fixation on the attorney-client privilege, and where its borders should be drawn when a party’s counsel plays a central role in the events that may or may not trigger insurance coverage or show bad faith. I have the same sort of cartographer’s obsession with mapping where those borders should be when the administrator of an ERISA governed plan makes a benefit determination based on the investigation and legal conclusions of counsel. What happens to the privilege, for instance, if a company’s in-house counsel interprets the plan’s terms and applies them to the facts, thereafter recommending to the plan administrator what decision to render on a claim? And what happens if the plan administrator then adopts that recommendation as its determination? One can picture the same scenario involving reliance on outside counsel to do the same work.

Well, as this well-developed post from the Health Plan Law blog discusses, the plan administrator can delegate in this manner to counsel, and adopt counsel’s findings, at least as a general statement. But what effect would doing so have on the attorney-client privilege that would otherwise normally attach to communications between counsel and a client? Health Plan Law has this to say on that topic:

The question is this: while a plan may consistent with exercise of fiduciary discretion delegate duties as to claim investigation to legal counsel, is there a concomitant sacrifice in scope of privileged communications?
A fundamental legal principle states that the attorney-client privilege may be waived expressly or by implication. Implied waivers are consistently construed narrowly.See, In re Lott, 424 F.3d 446, 452 (6th Cir.2005). On the other hand, “an attorney-client communication is placed at issue when the party makes an assertion that in fairness requires examination of protected communications.” Clevenger v. Dillard’s Department Stores, Inc. Slip Copy, 2007 WL 27978 (S.D.Ohio 2007) (Dillard’s defendants impliedly waived the privilege for communications with legal counsel related to plan termination). The concern raised here is succinctly stated as follows: ‘the attorney-client privilege cannot at once be used as a shield and a sword.’ United States v. Bilzerian, 926 F.2d 1285, 1292 (2d Cir.1991)
And then again, to what extent does privilege apply in fiduciary matters in any event? In this connection consider the following regarding the “fiduciary exception”:
Most courts, including the Seventh Circuit, have recognized the existence of a fiduciary exception to the attorney-client privilege. In J.H. Chapman Group, Ltd. v. Chapman, No. 95 C 7716, 1996 WL 238863 (N.D.Ill. May 2, 1998), for example, the court explained that “[t]he fiduciary duty exception ‘is based on the notion that a communication between an attorney and a client is not privileged from those to whom the client owes a fiduciary duty.”See also Bland v. Fiatallis North America, Inc., 401 F.3d 779, 787 (7th Cir.2005) (recognizing fiduciary exception in the ERISA context).

On more of a concrete and less abstract level, you can think about this in terms of the administrative record; there are exceptions, but in most circumstances and in most courts, the administrative record would make up the universe of evidence that the court can consider in ruling on a challenge to an administrator's determination of a particular claim.  Generally speaking, the administrative record is to contain the information relied upon or considered by the administrator in making that determination.  But what about attorney advice received by the administrator and relied upon by it?  The scope of the attorney-client privilege can impact whether or not that advice should be part of the administrative record.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans , Retirement Benefits
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Permalink | Just a brief note today on something interesting that caught my eye concerning a topic, top hat plans, that we have discussed a fair amount recently. Here is a nice detailed technical discussion of top hat plans from the BNA Pension and Benefits Blog. The discussion is centered around the Alexander case out of the federal district court that I talked about here, and on which the post’s author apparently served as a non-testifying expert.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans , Fiduciaries , Retirement Benefits , Summary Plan Descriptions
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Permalink | A few short notes of interest from a weekend of reading:

• Jerry Kalish has nice things to say about (and agrees with) my recent post concerning the Second Circuit’s decision - correct in my view - precluding summary plan descriptions from trumping the actual plan terms.

• I don’t know quite what to say about this article from yesterday’s Boston Globe about town retirement boards and their travel expenses, other than to note that if you don’t want to face exposure as a fiduciary, this type of conduct probably isn’t the way to go about it.

• And finally, WorkPlace Prof collected this information about whether health savings accounts constitute employee benefit plans governed by ERISA. He cites a report to the effect that they do not. Of particular interest, the post points out that employer contributions to the accounts will not necessarily transform them into ERISA governed plans, because employer contributions alone do not in and of themselves render a plan an ERISA governed plan. I have discussed before the totality of factual circumstances that are to be considered in the First Circuit to determine whether a benefit is an ERISA governed plan, and the fact that the source of funding alone is not determinative.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Long Term Disability Benefits , Preemption
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Preemption is a tough defense to get around, particularly in the First Circuit, where it is taken quite seriously and numerous decisions expressly declare particular state law causes of action to be preempted by ERISA. One clever response to this problem, at least when the facts will allow the argument, is to try to sidestep any fight over preemption itself by arguing that the benefit at issue was not even provided by an employee welfare benefit plan and that as a result, ERISA does not apply and state law claims over the denial of the benefits are actionable. There is more room to maneuver on such an argument than in a battle over preemption, because the test recognized in the First Circuit for determining whether a benefit was in fact provided by an employee welfare benefit plan is mutlipronged, fact based, and, on at least some elements of the test, rather amorphous. At the same time, however, it doesn't take much for an employee benefit to qualify as an ERISA governed employee welfare benefit plan, at least in this circuit.

The test is laid out and then explored in great detail in a recent decision, James O'Leary v. Provident Life and Accident Insurance Co., by Judge Saylor of the United States District Court here in Massachusetts. The court explained that "an employee welfare benefit plan has five elements: (1) a plan, fund, or program (2) established or maintained (3) by an employer or by an employee organization, or by both, (4) for the purpose of providing. . . disability. . . benefits (5) to participants or their beneficiaries," and that these are factual inquiries. In many instances involving larger employers, the application of these factors and the conclusion that should be reached are transparent from the outset; even without looking closely at the factors, there is little room to doubt that, for example, a large company's disability benefits plan for its employees satisfies these elements and is an ERISA governed plan.

What made the application of these factors interesting in the case before the court was the particular dynamic generated by the fact that it was a small employer and many of the facts at issue with regard to the employment benefit in question were unique to that one employee who was denied the benefits in question and was filing suit. This fact pattern took the case out of the realm of if it "looks like a duck and walks like a duck, its an employee welfare benefit plan," and placed it instead in the realm of coverages that might just be personal to the employee rather than part of an ERISA governed plan. It wasn't, the court eventually concluded, but the analysis in reaching that point is informative.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Benefit Litigation , ERISA Statutory Provisions , Employee Benefit Plans , Standard of Review
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This being - roughly - the start of a new month, I engaged in my usual habit of reviewing any ERISA decisions issued in the past month by the courts in the First Circuit, just to make sure I didn't miss anything while busy with the usual run of business. As it turns out, on July 20th, the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island issued its opinion in Holm v. Liberty Mutual Life Assurance Co. and Bank of America , a case in which an employee who had resigned from a company without first seeking disability benefits thereafter sought them later. In many ways, this is a traditional denial of benefits decision in this circuit, with the court finding that the plan granted the administrator sufficient discretion to invoke the arbitrary and capricious standard of review and then finding that under that standard the administrator's denial of benefits must be upheld since there was sufficient evidence in the record to support the decision. The court does offer some good language, and a good synopsis of the circuit's most popular decisions, on these points, and, frankly, you can tell on one read of the opinion that the outcome should have been the same regardless of the level of review applied by the court.

What makes the decision more interesting than most, however, is that the case presented the somewhat unique situation of the defendants raising the question of whether the benefit was even provided under an ERISA governed plan, and the court provides a nice summary of the law in this circuit for making that determination. As per the court (I have left out the cites):

ERISA provides a broad definition for employee benefit plans, and this definition has been divided by the First Circuit into "five essential constituents:"
(1) a plan, fund or program (2) established or maintained (3) by an employer or by an employee organization, or by both (4) for the purpose of providing medical, surgical, hospital care, sickness, accident, disability, death, unemployment or vacation benefits ... (5) to participants or their beneficiaries. . . . In determining whether a specific plan is an ERISA plan, the First Circuit reviews the extent of the employer's role in administering the benefits. Those obligations are the touchstone of the determination: if they require an ongoing administrative scheme that is subject to mismanagement, then they will more likely constitute an ERISA plan; but if the benefit obligations are merely a one-shot, take-it-or-leave-it incentive, they are less likely to be covered. Particularly germane to assessing an employer's obligations is the amount of discretion wielded in implementing them.

The court had little trouble concluding that the benefit plan in question was "clearly an employee benefit plan as defined by the ERISA statute" in light of the actual facts of the matter.