WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, CHIP HILTON?
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Investment Management Roundtable Discussion – Personal Estate Planning
Pension risk transfers (“PRTs”) continue to make the news. And well they should. Last year alone, over $100 billion in liabilities were transferred from defined benefit pension plans to insurance companies. And the trend...more
Over the last several years, numerous large pension plan sponsors have transferred billions of dollars in financial risk related to their pension plan benefit obligations to insurance companies through the purchase of group...more
Regulators Hit Jackpot: Off-Channel Communications - Several years before announcing the first “off-channel” communications enforcement action, the SEC and FINRA cautioned broker-dealers and investment advisers about...more
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed the dismissal of a putative class action against a brokerage firm and its parent company, holding that the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act (SLUSA) barred the...more
The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts recently diverged from other decisions interpreting the term “actuarial equivalent” in an Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) class action, finding that...more
Life insurers bid farewell to a fairly moderate year of class action litigation. Although several class actions were filed against life insurers in the last quarter of 2019, the filings were reflective of the litigation...more
In December 2018, class action lawsuits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) were filed against several large single-employer defined benefit plans. The suits focus on the calculation of joint and...more
A Louisiana appeals court recently affirmed class certification in consolidated lawsuits, pending since 1991, against Louisiana’s Department of Insurance, other related state entities, and the state’s excess insurance...more
New York Pushes Mutual Fund Active Share Disclosure - New York’s Attorney General issued a report on its recent investigation of fees charged by actively managed equity mutual funds and a metric known as “Active Share.”...more
In City of Westland Police & Fire Retirement System v. MetLife, the plaintiffs allege that the insurer overstated its earnings because it did not hold sufficient reserves for death benefit claims on group life insurance...more
In May, the Southern District of California handed ING a win in a case involving allegations that the company targeted seniors with annuities that hid an embedded derivative structure that made them worth less than promised....more
Last month, we wrote about potential litigation issues under the “revised temporary” DOL Rule involving the offer and sale of annuities in the IRA market. This paper continues that discussion. I emphasize to the reader that...more
On March 31, in Chambers v. N. American Co. for Life & Health Ins., an action alleging RICO violations and other claims in the sales of deferred annuities to seniors, the Southern District of Iowa granted the insurer’s motion...more
Because annuity contracts involve the payment of money in the expectation of future payments, one might conclude that they are securities within the meaning of the California Corporate Securities Law of 1968. Evidently, that...more
- AXA Prevails at First Post-Jones v. Harris Excessive Fee Trial - Potential Secondary Effects of Regulatory Examinations: Evidentiary Issues and Preclusion in Parallel Litigation - On The Horizon: Global...more
Recent federal court decisions effectively terminated two class action lawsuits challenging indexed annuity sales, seemingly ending an extended wave of class litigation in the federal courts against multiple insurers...more
The creative theories of liability and damages on display in the recent certification of multiple classes suggest that the long run of annuity class actions is not over yet. Plaintiff in Abbit v. ING USA Annuity and Life...more
WilmerHale Partner Charles Platt, a leading commercial litigator who is recognized nationally for his work defending financial services and insurance companies, periodically drafts legal news alerts for clients about the life...more
Class action plaintiffs have long claimed that insurance companies may become ERISA fiduciaries when offering variable annuity products and funds to 401(k) plans. The Colorado federal court decision in Teets v. Great...more
There have been several new class actions filed recently challenging “shadow insurance” transactions between life insurance companies and their “captive reinsurers.” Three of those class actions are in federal court in New...more
A recent decision on "excessive fees," titled Santomenno v. Transamerica Life (C.D. Cal.), supports an even broader theory of ERISA liability than the "sub-advisor" claims I have previously reviewed, but it restricts that...more
The August 2015 decision from the 9th Circuit, titled Eller v. Equitrust Life Ins. Co, provides helpful precedent for the defense of annuity sales practice cases. Plaintiff Eller brought a RICO class action alleging,...more
March 26 marked the beginning of the end for the storied 14-year litigation concerning Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Pre-MN annuities when the Eastern District of Wisconsin granted preliminary approval of a proposed...more
After attending an annuity seminar, Robert and Diane Ruud exchanged their variable annuity for a fixed annuity sold by PHL Variable. According to the Ruuds, seminar provider John Friendshuh represented the fixed annuity as...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed summary judgment for the insurer in a putative RICO class action relating to a bonus indexed annuity. Rejecting the plaintiff’s claims, the court held that the...more