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
More on Top Hat Plans
I have been meaning to return to this point for the last several days, but the crush of business has kept me from it. I discussed in a recent post a case that I think has the potential to be very influential on the subject of proving or disproving top hat status, involving surgeons and
The Tripartite Relationship and the Attorney Client Privilege
One of the more unwieldy of legal fictions is the so-called tripartite relationship among the insured, the insurer, and the defense counsel defending the insured against the claim. Duties run every which way in the relationship, and this beast is at its most cantankerous when one gets into the question of how the attorney client
Supreme Court to Review Fiduciary Duties of Administrators
One of the things that makes practicing in and blogging about ERISA interesting is the fact that the subject area is never static. Other areas of the law can literally evolve at a near glacial pace (see, for example, this post here, involving the law of malicious prosecution and a change, for the first
Top Hat Plans and ERISA
One of the most interesting and potentially influential of the ERISA decisions rendered by the courts in the First Circuit during the holiday season that just closed is Eben Alexander v Brigham and Women’s Physician Organization, in which the court issued its findings, after a trial, on whether two particular deferred compensation plans for
Wal-Mart and Preemption
It is likely that if you are interested in the subject of this blog you already know that the Fourth Circuit has now affirmed the District Court decision striking down Maryland’s Fair Share Act. Workplace prof has a nice post summing up the issue here, and major media accounts can be found here and here.