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
Talkin’ With Tom Gies, Counsel for the Respondents in LaRue
I promised awhile back that I would run more interviews at some point on this blog, and we return today to our – granted, somewhat sporadic – series of interviews with movers and shakers in the worlds of ERISA and insurance. What provoked me to get back into the interviewing business, which I noted before
Controlling Costs in Patent Infringement Litigation
I tried a patent infringement case to a jury last spring, and while I was quite pleased with the outcome, I left the experience very concerned about the tremendous cost of litigating patent infringement cases. Thinking back over the course of the litigation, I was able to identify some central principles for reigning in the
State Mandates and Health Insurance Pricing
Well now, this morning I came across this interesting post here, on the State Policy Blog, comparing health insurance pricing in one semi-unregulated state insurance market (Colorado) and in a state, Massachusetts, with a state mandate requiring health insurance. As you can see from the post, the numbers show pricing is significantly higher
Protecting Corporate Officers from Fiduciary Exposure
Here’s an interesting article on one particular aspect of ERISA breach of fiduciary duty cases, namely the targeting as defendants of executive officers of the company sponsoring a pension or 401(k) plan; the gist of the article is that there are tactical and psychological benefits that accrue to counsel representing plan participants when they name