From the perspective of plan sponsors and fiduciaries, the main advantage of mandatory arbitration is that it has been perceived as a way of avoiding the potentially large recoveries available to plaintiffs in class action lawsuits. But in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 context, accomplishing this through arbitration provisions may not be […]
Courts Are Right To Reject Insurer ERISA Attorney Fee AwardsBy Elizabeth Hopkins, Partner at Kantor & Kantor, LLPExpert Analysis – OpinionAs the U.S. Supreme Court has often recognized, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act is remedial legislation that is primarily intended to protect plan participants and beneficiaries, promote their interests and ensure that they receive the benefits they […]
The State Of Article III Standing In ERISA CasesBy Elizabeth Hopkins, Partner at Kantor & Kantor, LLPExpert AnalysisMore than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2020 Employee Retirement Income Security Act ruling in Thole v. U.S. Bank, it is fair to ask whether lower courts have heeded the justices’ admonition and made sense of […]
On April 8, 2020, Kantor & Kantor Partner Elizabeth Hopkins and Karen L. Handorf of Cohen Milstein, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court for Phyllis Borzi and Dan Maguire, two former, high-ranking Department of Labor officials.The brief supports a number of States that successfully challenged a newly-enacted federal regulation, which runs contrary to […]
The Supreme Court handed down a victory on February 26, 2020, to employees whose pension, healthcare, or other benefit plans were mismanaged. Under ERISA, the federal law that governs such plans, those who manage or administer such plans are considered fiduciaries bound by strict standards that require them to act with great care and in […]
The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday, November 6, 2019, in Retirement Plans Committee of IBM v. Jander, an ERISA case challenging the prudence of fiduciary decisions with respect to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The Court granted certiorari to review whether the Second Circuit correctly applied the Court’s “more harm than good” standard set […]
Elizabeth Hopkins, a partner at Kantor & Kantor, LLP, was a part of the team that recently obtained a favorable decision from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, concluding that a widow could hold her deceased husband’s employer accountable for its actions in preventing her from obtaining the life insurance under her […]
Undeterred by a federal court’s recent ruling striking down most of a Department of Labor (DOL) regulation that allowed small employers and sole proprietors to band together to form association healthcare plans (AHP), DOL is giving top priority to finalizing a rule that will do much the same thing on the pension side.The proposed pension […]
The Supreme Court agreed Monday, June 10, 2019, to resolve a conflict between the Ninth Circuit and the Sixth Circuit on when ERISA’s three-year statute of limitations begins to run. The statute provides that a fiduciary breach claim may be brought within six years of a breach unless the plaintiff had “actual knowledge” of the […]
In recent years, UnitedHealth Group has ramped up its practice of recovering supposed overpayments to medical providers on claims of plan participants in one healthcare plan by offsetting these “overpayments” against (and therefore often totally disallowing) payments on the claims of participants in an unrelated plan.Keep in mind that the participants in the plans normally […]
