This is a quick note on a new Chapter 93A decision by the Massachusetts Appeals Court that I want to highlight for a couple of reasons. Chapter 93A, for those readers from out of state, is Massachusetts’ consumer protection and unfair business practices statute. The statute is a very powerful weapon in the right case
This is a fun but dry (don’t worry – you will get the joke in a second) decision from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on whether rainwater that accumulates on a roof constitutes “surface waters” for purposes of an insurance policy. Of more practical value to most lawyers and of more interest to me, however
Jacklyn Wille of Bloomberg Law, who by now knows more about ERISA litigation than most ERISA litigators, has an interesting article out (you can find it here; subscription may be required), concerning court approval of a “$1.7 million class settlement benefiting participants in an Advance Auto Parts Inc. subsidiary’s retirement plan . . .
I suspect that no one understands as well as an ERISA litigator the extent to which the rules governing judicial decision making either determine the outcome of a dispute or, at a minimum, dictate a specific and limited range of potential outcomes as well as establish the respective odds of each. In the context of
This is a fascinating story of risk management and the commodification of ERISA class action litigation. It’s the story of a $2.45 million settlement of a class action concerning the alleged use of outdated mortality tables in a pension plan. For many years, including by me in this blog, ERISA lawyers and commentators have been
At this point in my career, I have litigated just about every type of ERISA claim I can think of, from denied benefit claims to deferred compensation/top hat claims to class actions. I have even made new law in the still developing area of equitable relief under ERISA. I got my start in ERISA litigation
When I was a very junior (probably first year) lawyer, one of the founding deans of the modern policyholder practice, Jerry Oshinsky, when he found out I was working on the concept of partial equitable subrogation in the context of insurance losses, laughed and said he considered the entire subject to be “black magic,” more
I wanted to pass along this advisory from Davis Wright Tremaine which argues for legislative action to, in essence, raise the bar that plaintiffs have to hurdle to prosecute an ERISA excessive fee class action. What I like most about it is the authors do not simply complain and ask for legislative intervention, but instead
The Department of Labor’s regulation governing ERISA claims and administrative appeals provides a comprehensive structure for the claim process required of all ERISA plans. While there is plenty of room within the context of the regulation for a particular plan to contain its own essentially bespoke claims process, the regulation imposes the broader outline with
I did not intend to return, yet again, to the summary judgment opinion in Sellers as gist for a blog post. Something about it that I haven’t touched on yet, however, keeps overlapping with other developments which caught my attention because of their relationship to long standing interests of mine related to trial work, discovery