It’s probably become obvious over the years to anyone that reads this blog regularly, that I love contracts. It was my favorite class during first year of law school (everyone else preferred torts, with its car crashes and the like) and one of the reasons I have spent decades litigating insurance coverage disputes is they
Group life is the redheaded stepchild of employee benefits, often added on by insurers on top of the primary products being sold to plan sponsors and employers, such as disability insurance. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, except that problems tend to crop up in the administration of group life plans and in the
On the Fid Guru Blog, Euclid Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz has an excellent deep dive on the question of jury trials in breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA, asking the questions of, first, whether they are really coming and, two, if so, is that a good or a bad thing (his take clearly appears to
There is an interesting article in the Guardian on the subject of structural and policy barriers in the United States to the elimination of poverty, which is addressed in a new book by a MacArthur award winning sociologist. I think the New Yorker has a new article out on the same topic, probably based on
One of my partners emailed me the other day with kind words about my blog, and I responded that there was plenty to write about these days when it comes to ERISA and insurance. Amusingly, this morning’s inbox ended up presenting the perfect exemplar. I was sitting down to write some follow up comments on
I recently visited Monticello, a place, being a history buff, I had always meant to tour; suffice it to say, it did not disappoint. Among other things, it was an interesting reminder of an oft-forgotten point, namely that for many years, the American “frontier,” for all intents and purposes, is what is now modern
I have returned to blogging after stepping away for awhile from regular posting for a number of reasons ; foremost among them, however, is wanting to talk regularly about the continuing evolution in this area of the law toward a more even playing field for both employees and employers, and away from the many structural
I was being interviewed by a reporter the other day and casually noted that I keep my twitter open on my computer all day for no other reason than to follow Bloomberg BNA’s nearly instantaneous reporting of important new court decisions in the ERISA field. True to form, this morning I came into work to an article on, and a copy of the decision by, the Second Circuit yesterday in the long running pension class action case, Osberg v. Foot Locker, which concerns a claim for reformation of a pension plan to provide employees with the benefits they believed were promised in plan communications, rather than those actually provided under the plan’s express terms themselves. You can find the Bloomberg BNA article on it here, and the decision itself here.
Continue Reading Reflections on the Second Circuit’s Decision in Osberg v. Foot Locker
Is there anything more interesting right now than ERISA §502(a)(3)? For those of you who don’t know it off the top of your head, and don’t feel like googling it right this second, this is the section of ERISA’s remedies provision that authorizes suits for equitable relief. For the longest time, this was a nearly
Last week, I spoke on a panel with, among others, Trucker Huss’ Joe Faucher, who discussed some aspects of Ninth Circuit ERISA jurisprudence with a mostly East Coast-centric audience. A week later, that circuit has turned out two of the more interesting and potentially significant appellate decisions in ERISA that any court has produced