A couple of notes on cases today. Before the holidays, I posted about the First Circuit’s decision in Gillis, concerning an administrator’s discretion in calculating possible pension payments and how the discretionary authority granted to the administrator drove the conclusion that a challenge to the pension calculations would not be upheld in the courts.
Will the Critics Get Their Wish? The Supreme Court Gives Some Thought to Structural Conflicts of Interest
Unlike me, Appellate Law and Practice, the scrivener who covers all things appellate, didn’t take New Year’s Eve off, and noted that day that the federal government had recommended that the Supreme Court accept cert in a case addressing the question of how a structural conflict of interest – that is, where the administrator
ERISA Preempts Another One: Striking Down the San Francisco Ordinance
Well, I have talked before about dog bites man stories, and here’s another one. The United States District Court for the District of Northern California has now ruled that San Francisco’s ordinance requiring certain health care expenditures by employers was preempted by ERISA. The Workplace Prof sums up the ruling here, although he is wrong
Age Discrimination, or a Rational Response to Economic Factors?
Take a few days off, and news just keeps on piling up. In the next few posts, I am going to try to pass along some of the more interesting events, articles, court decisions and stories that crossed my desk over the past several days, starting with this one, a story out of the New
The First Circuit on an Administrator’s Discretion in Determining the Amount of Retirement Benefits
Oddly, this appears to be “calculating benefits” week among the courts of the First Circuit. In addition to the LeBlanc case I discussed in the last post, the First Circuit just ruled on a case involving a challenge to the calculation of pension benefits. Just as in the LeBlanc case, where a district court found
When Can You Sue an Employer for Denial of ERISA Governed Benefits?
Interesting case out of the United States District Court for the District of Maine the other day, concerning a challenge by a plan participant to how his long term disability payments were calculated. The court essentially found that, since deferential review applied, the administrator’s calculation method could not be challenged, since it was a reasonable
Conducting an ERISA Self-Audit
We spend a lot of time here at the blog talking about lawsuits, causes of action, and court rulings concerning ERISA issues; the name of the blog, after all, is the Boston ERISA and Insurance Litigation blog. But every litigator knows that the flip side to a lawsuit is prevention, and the key to prevention
California, Fair Share Acts and Preemption: Have We Learned Anything At All?
I’ve got a few things lined up this week to talk about, running from long term disability benefits litigation to avoiding ERISA litigation to subprime mortgages, but first I am going to veer off of my planned course to pass along and comment on a pair of interesting posts that showed up in my in-box
What the Copyright Act Teaches Us About ERISA Preemption
Mixing up two of my professional interests and litigation specialties, ERISA and intellectual property, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit just decided a case involving the scope of preemption under the Copyright Act. What’s particularly interesting to me is the characterization by a dissenting member of the panel about the scope
On Regulation of Fiduciaries and Pension Plan Vendors
I was interviewed by a reporter recently concerning the subprime mess and its implications for pension plan fiduciaries, and the issue came up as to whether further regulation was the answer, as she had heard from a number of others. To me, the ongoing problem we are seeing with fiduciary breaches – or at least