This is interesting. I have written before on this blog, on numerous occasions, about courts sometimes engaging in a more searching level of discretionary review that, in essence, is not discretionary review at all, at least in the manner it has long been traditionally understood. The common belief, and applied in that way by many

I just noticed I haven’t posted since last year, for a few weeks to be more accurate, due to the usual end of the year crunch and a briefing schedule in a case overlaid on top of that to boot. No matter the reason, it runs afoul of my general feeling that you shouldn’t host

I have been wondering about the question of whether state insurance commissioners can effectively gut the industry practice of including discretionary clauses in disability policies by refusing to approve forms for use that include them, or whether ERISA preemption precludes that action. I was preoccupied with a trial at the end of October when the

Here’s a nice little story on Conkright, and the new Supreme Court session. As the article explains in a nutshell:

The issue in Conkright vs. Frommert involves how much deference a court must give to an ERISA plan administrator’s interpretation of the terms of the plan. A group of Xerox Corp. retirees who left

There is an interesting twist to a recent Seventh Circuit decision, Leger v. Tribune Company Long Term Disability Plan. The decision starts out as an attempt by the participant to resuscitate her benefits claim by invoking Glenn v. MetLife and asserting that a structural conflict of interest existed warranting an alteration to the standard

I will be presenting a seminar next week, on Wednesday January 14th, to the ASPPA Benefits Council of New England, entitled “ERISA Litigation: An Update from the Front Lines.” After three full days of outlining my talk, I now actually have a pretty good idea of what I am going to say; the talk will

I wrote a long time back about Stamp v. MetLife, a decision out of the United States District Court for Rhode Island on a particular, oft litigated, and unfortunately frequently repeated fact pattern: namely, whether an unwitnessed automobile accident causing death of an apparently intoxicated driver constituted an accident for purposes of ERISA governed