We’re back! As I have been promising (threatening?) to do since my partner and I launched our new firm on June 1, I am again writing my weekly Five Favorites for Friday blog post. I never meant to stop doing it, but I just plain ran out of time each week with the launch, between work on existing cases for existing clients, new work for new clients, business management issues to learn, and all the rest.
For those of you who are new to this series or, given its hiatus, don’t recall the rules, they are simple. Every Friday, I write a post covering five topics, articles, podcasts, posts, and the like that caught my eye during the preceding week but never had time to discuss on their own.
So here we go.
- First off, let me thank everyone who has been so supportive in the launch of our firm. I couldn’t list you all if I wanted to. My partner and I are having a blast, between the complex litigation and ERISA issues we were handling before we launched that we are still handling to the new insurance, ERISA and litigation work we have received from new clients since launching. We have been working on multiple new DOL investigations, complex advising over insurance coverage for entities in the ERISA space, multiple problems in the provision of different types of benefit plans, a host of lawsuits and arbitrations, ongoing tech litigation, counseling in the AI space, and a number of disputes over contractual relationships in health insurance and health care.
- Speaking of contractual complexities in the health insurance space, I like this article from Monday’s Benefits Digest on the new lawsuit by six major employers trying to get access to health plan data and information about their own claims and plans. As the article explains, “the employers say they couldn’t see their own claims data well enough to know what they were paying for,” and the article references the importance for plan sponsors of understanding their rights and obligations under administrative services agreements. These types of agreements in the context of benefit plans are seldom customer friendly and I always advise employers to have someone study them carefully before they sign on the bottom line (although to be fair, my views may suffer from a selection bias, in that I typically see those agreements only once there is at least a whiff of a dispute in the air, which may increase the odds that I only see the ones that are problematic).
- This series has been off the air for a few months, although I have been commenting on LinkedIn about major judicial happenings in the ERISA world. So I thought it would be a good idea to include in this week’s Five Favorites a summary of key ERISA litigation developments published during the hiatus, and I liked this one enough to include it.
- What employers like to think of as voluntary benefits, I often like to think of as no good deed goes unpunished. This story from Encore Fiduciary’s Fid Guru blog will tell you why.
- Personally, I think plan sponsors should be able to correct any and all mistakes in benefit plans through a government approved correction process, anytime there was no harm to participants or beneficiaries from the mistake or, if there was, the correction involves all the harm being remedied. So I was happy to see an expansion of correction processes and opportunities, although, given my sentiments on the matter, I don’t think the expansion goes far enough. Anyway, here’s a good blog post on the latest changes. The author’s even got a podcast on the subject, which you can find here. (Yes, I threw a sixth into the Five Favorites as a bonus).