WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, CHIP HILTON?
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Investment Management Roundtable Discussion – Personal Estate Planning
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas dealt a major blow to the putative class action Torres v. American Airlines, Inc., finding that the four named plaintiffs are not adequate class representatives for...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
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
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
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
The Southern District of California recently certified California and multistate classes of annuities purchasers in a case challenging the allegedly abusive design, execution, and pricing of fixed index annuities (FIA). The...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