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Peter Sessions

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Peter S. Sessions is a partner at Kantor & Kantor who has been with the firm since 2004. Peter represents individual clients seeking health, life, and disability benefits, typically under employee health plans.

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Williams v. Wright, No. CV BPG-21-2076, 2022 WL 2818949 (D. Md. July 19, 2022) (Magistrate Judge Beth P. Gesner).

This decision involves the third of three related lawsuits between certain members of the wealthy duPont family and their household employees regarding the employees’ entitlement to retirement benefits. To properly understand this suit under ERISA’s anti-retaliation provision, you have to go back to the first suit and its history, which actually begins in 1947.
Continue Reading Plan Participant States a Claim That She Was Sued for Seeking Plan Benefits

Woolsey v. Aetna Life Ins. Co., No. 20-16885, __ Fed. Appx. __, 2022 WL 1598964 (9th Cir. May 20, 2022) (Before Circuit Judges Hawkins, Paez, and Watford).

In 2010, in Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., the Supreme Court ruled that ERISA claimants need not be “prevailing parties” in order to be eligible for an award of attorney’s fees. Instead, they only need to obtain “some success on the merits.” What does that mean? The Court explained that a claimant must achieve more than “trivial success” or a “purely procedural victory,” and that a trial court should not conduct a “lengthy inquiry into the question whether a particular party’s success was ‘substantial’ or occurred on a ‘central issue.’”

As you might imagine, this answer only raised more questions. The lower courts have been wrestling with the issue of how much success is “some success on the merits” ever since Hardt. One recurring scenario is when a trial court finds that the claims process was somehow defective and remands the case back to the claim administrator for further action. Is that sufficient “success on the merits” to qualify the claimant for a fee award?
Continue Reading Kantor & Kantor Convinces Ninth Circuit That Remand Order Made Claimant Eligible for Attorney’s Fees

Your ERISA Watch – Eighth Circuit Rules That Reliance Standard’s “Haphazard System of Ships Passing in the Night” Led to a Breach of Fiduciary Duty

Skelton v. Radisson Hotel Bloomington, No. 21-2641, __ F.4th __, 2022 WL 1434778 (8th Cir. May 6, 2022) (Before Circuit Judges Gruender, Benton, and Erickson).

ERISA-governed life insurance benefit plans are typically administered jointly by the employer and an insurance company. The exact duties of each party vary from plan to plan, but often the division of responsibility is confusing. It is common for one party to be uncertain as to what the other is supposed to be doing, and frequently neither party possesses full information as to which employees have signed up for what, and whether those employees have met all the requirements for eligibility or enrollment.
Continue Reading Eighth Circuit Rules That Reliance Standard’s “Haphazard System of Ships Passing in the Night” Led to a Breach of Fiduciary Duty