Benefits & ERISA Law

Conkright, Discretion and the Supreme Court

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 and then returned before retiring brought the suit. At issue is the method of accounting for lump sum distributions received by the employees when they first left the company when determining the benefits to which they were entitled at retirement.

In a review of the case, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that a district court has no obligation to defer to a plan administrator's reasonable interpretation of the plan's terms if the administrator arrived at the conclusion outside the context of an administrative claim for benefits. It also held that a district court has 'allowable discretion' to adopt any 'reasonable' interpretation of the retirement plan terms under certain circumstances. The high court has not set a date for oral arguments.

I studiously ignored Conkright during the cert phase - we will discuss it in detail in future posts, however. Gut instinct right now, based only on what the Court did with its most recent ERISA cases? Expect a decision that narrows the administrator's discretion and gives more freedom of interpretation to the court.  How's that for instant analysis?

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on October 05, 2009 (boomark / email).