Roy Harmon, over at his Health Plan Law blog, has his typically scholarly take on two recent rulings out of the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire in the case of Hopper v. Standard Insurance Company. The rulings primarily revolve around the question of which claims in the lawsuit
The Idea of Single Payer Health Insurance
Well, health insurance really isn’t a major focus of this blog, although we do comment on it from time to time, and it certainly touches on both focuses of this blog, ERISA and insurance. Employer provided health insurance has always done well by me and mine, so I don’t really have a vested interest in
Cyberinsurance
I was going to write about something else today – about a particular technical, tactical issue in litigating insurance coverage and ERISA, particularly breach of fiduciary duty, cases – but I came across something else that was too intriguing to me to pass up, and I will return later this week to the issue I
Electronic Discovery and the Amendment to Rule 26
I came out on the wrong side of this order from one of my cases, but that’s alright; although John Barth’s fictional lawyer in the Floating Opera may have never lost a case, any real life lawyer who tells you the same thing is, well, speaking fiction.
But it is an interesting ruling nonetheless, on
ERISA, Interpleader and Qualified Domestic Relations Orders
Recently, waiting for a pretrial conference in federal court on one of my cases, I listened as a judge explained to the lawyers in a different case, based on only knowing the causes of action, what the actual facts of the case before him must be, even though he had never heard from the parties before. He
Robert Kingsley on Insurance Industry Consolidation, and the Pros and Cons of Hiring Lawyers
This blog serves many purposes, at least in my mind. Among them is to bring to the reader information he or she may otherwise not have access to, and another is for me to investigate things in the insurance and ERISA fields that I am interested in. I think both of these purposes are well
The Attorney-Client Privilege, ERISA and the Administrative Record
No doubt at least some of you have noticed my fixation on the attorney-client privilege, and where its borders should be drawn when a party’s counsel plays a central role in the events that may or may not trigger insurance coverage or show bad faith. I have the same sort of cartographer’s obsession with
More on Top Hat Plans and the Alexander Decision
Just a brief note today on something interesting that caught my eye concerning a topic, top hat plans, that we have discussed a fair amount recently. Here is a nice detailed technical discussion of top hat plans from the BNA Pension and Benefits Blog. The discussion is centered around the Alexander case out of the
The Effect of the Savings Rate on 401(k) Fee and Other Retirement Benefit Litigation
Now here’s a curious little article from the New York Times on the question of whether mutual fund companies, including in their retirement calculators, deliberately overestimate the amount that people must save and invest to be able to afford to retire. The article notes that a number of respected economists find this to be the
Improving the Insurer Insured Relationship
This post from Legal Sanity, in which the writer talks about the importance of mutually beneficial business relationships, defined as those in which each side essentially is watching out for the other even more than for itself, caught my attention, although not, I am sure, for the reason the writer intended, who wrote it