There are many variations on the old question that, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall. I am sure, like me, you have heard many versions of that question that are not fit to be reprinted in a PG-13 rated blog.

But I couldn’t help thinking of that line when I read a recent decision from the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In Morgan v. Reliance Standard, an LTD insurer terminated benefits, and the participant responded in, literally, “dismay,” writing a letter to the company expressing that sentiment. The carrier treated it as an appeal of the original termination, although apparently with some trepidation as to whether an appeal was really being filed. The insurer processed it as an appeal, in standard – and from the looks of the decision, appropriate – form, assigning it to an appropriate medical expert for a record review, eventually resulting in a decision upholding the denial on appeal.

Of course, that begged the existential question of whether there was an appeal at all, or, in other words, whether there can be an appeal if the participant, who must file the appeal, doesn’t mean to file one and doesn’t think he filed one. While one might think that someone must actually file an appeal to have an appeal, you would be wrong. The Court found that the participant could not complain of the insurer’s crediting him with an appeal he didn’t file, unless he was prejudiced by it, because under the law in the First Circuit, procedural errors in handling a benefit claim do not give rise to a remedy unless the participant was prejudiced by the error. The Court found that the course of communications between the insurer and the participant caused the participant to have essentially the same protections in the processing of his claim as he would have had if he had, in fact, filed an appeal, and that the participant therefore suffered no prejudice from the fact that his claim was treated as though appealed. The Court then proceeded to decide the case on its merits.

I am not certain whether this case really teaches us anything new about ERISA litigation, since it is very fact specific and certainly concerns a situation that is unlikely to repeat itself very often. It does, though, appear to provide an answer to the question of whether a tree actually falls in the forest if no one is there to hear it: the answer is clearly yes, at least if a court in the First Circuit is deciding the answer.

Thanks, incidentally, is due to Rob Hoskins’ baby, the ERISA Board, for catching this odd little fact pattern, and giving me an excuse to discuss trees, forests, and what they have to do with ERISA.