Michael Pratico, a fiduciary advisor to retirement plans throughout New England for Captrust Financial Advisors, and one of my favorite touchstones for real world – i.e. non-lawyer – information about the actual operation of retirement benefit plans, pointed out an interesting conundrum to me the other day concerning the operations of retirement plans and
Anne B. Kingsley Ovarian Cancer Foundation
When I posted my interview with veteran insurance executive Robert Kingsley a couple weeks ago, on the subjects of insurance industry consolidation and what insurers think about the lawyers they hire, I failed to mention that, in addition to his years in the industry, Rob is also the founder of the Anne B. Kingsley Ovarian
Law Reviews Are Dead, They Just Don’t Know It Yet
Kevin O’Keefe, the trial lawyer turned legal blogging evangelist who runs LexBlog, the company that provides the technical support – but not any of the copy – for this blog and for the many other blogs listed on the lower left hand corner of this page, has been running a series of posts on the
When Is a Plan Administrator a Fiduciary?
Here is a fascinating decision out of the federal district court for Rhode Island arising out of a dispute over plan contributions required of a contractor under collective bargaining agreements in the construction context. What I most liked about the case is its discussion of the challenge to the plaintiffs’ standing to bring an ERISA
Directors and Officers Insurance, Backdating and Effective Coverage Counsel
Sometimes when I give seminars on directors and officers coverage, I like to pass along a story I once heard of a law professor who gives his students what he considers an impossible hypothetical, namely, how would you respond to a client who walks in the door saying that she has been asked to join
Insurance Brokers as ERISA Defendants
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