Well, given the title of this blog, I couldn’t exactly let this decision pass unnoticed. In this decision from the Court of Appeals of New York, Federal Insurance Company v. IBM, the Court denied insurance coverage for IBM under an excess fiduciary liability (apparently) policy, for a settlement by IBM of a claim that amendments to benefit plans in the 1990s violated ERISA. The Court, in short, found that the claim did not invoke IBM’s status as a fiduciary under ERISA, essentially because it involved settlor, rather than fiduciary, functions. The Court applied standard rules of policy interpretation, under which insurance policy language must be given a reasonable construction under the circumstances, to conclude that policy language that applied to claims against a fiduciary involving ERISA meant claims where the insured qualified as a fiduciary under that statute, and did not, contrary to IBM’s arguments, involve any broader meaning of the word fiduciary.
Three points about the case interested me, which I thought I would mention. The first is the case’s status as an exemplar of a phenomenon of insurance work that I have frequently mentioned in the past, which is that all major litigation disputes end up in court twice: the first time as against the insured, and the next time as against the insurer, involving the question of whether that first dispute is covered under the insurance policies held by that insured.
The second is that the case illustrates one of the most important aspects of another theme of this blog, which is the importance of what I have come here to call defensive plan building, which is a fancy way of saying developing benefit plans and affiliated structures that protect plan sponsors and fiduciaries from liability. Having liability insurance in place to protect them from the costs and potential liabilities of litigation is crucial. While in this case IBM can easily afford the uncovered exposure, this will not be the case for the vast majority of plan sponsors. Careful attention to the scope of, and holes within, insurance coverage for benefit plan operations is crucially important.
And finally, the humorous aspect of the decision is the third item, consisting of IBM being put in the position, to seek coverage, of having to argue for a broad definition of fiduciary in the context of a plan dispute. As we know from the controversy over the Department of Labor’s recent attempt to expand the definition of fiduciary under ERISA to catch more fish, most entities run from the label of fiduciary like a groom from a shotgun wedding.