Duane Morris ERISA Class Action Review – 2024

defined benefit plan. The court stated that it could not accept a legal conclusion regarding the cross-plan offset being a benefit denial because it was not necessarily a factual assertion. Therefore, the court found that the plaintiffs failed to plausibly plead that United denied them a contractually-guaranteed benefit under the Plans. The court reasoned that had United not engaged in cross-plan offsetting, the plaintiffs would be out-of-pocket the same amount. Therefore, the court stated that the plaintiffs received the benefits that the defendants promised to provide, i.e., they paid to obtain coverage under their employers’ self-insured Plans, which were administered by the defendants, the defendants selected to cover the plaintiffs’ healthcare services, and then the defendants paid the providers for those services. Id. at *20. Therefore, the court found that the plaintiffs did not allege a plausible injury and instead “received exactly what they signed up to receive.” Id. at 15. The plaintiffs also alleged that the defendants harmed them by creating an increased risk that their providers would bill or sue them in the future. The court rejected this argument. It reasoned that the plaintiffs failed to allege any facts that their providers were likely to bill them or that any provider had ever billed for an offset under the defendants’ healthcare plans. Therefore, the court reasoned that an injury was not imminent as required by Article III. Accordingly, the court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss for lack of standing. The court assessed the class representative ’ s standing to represent the putative class in Curtis, et al. v. Aetna Life Insurance Co., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 847 (D. Conn. Jan. 4, 2023). There, the putative class representative alleged the defendant denied class members medical benefits related to rehabilitative therapies. The plaintiff intended to represent class members in seeking relief for denial of benefits related to all rehabilitative therapies, even those he did not require. As such, the defendant sought dismissal of the plaintiff ’ s claims related to benefits for which he never submitted claims. The court found that the plaintiff did not have “standing” to represent class members who were denied coverage of rehabilitative therapies not sought by the plaintiff. Id. at *37. The court reasoned that the plaintiff did not have a stake in the denial of benefits that he did not seek and therefore lacked an incentive to present the distinct evidence required to prove the medical necessity of each and every therapy. Id. at 28. However, the court opined that the plaintiff had standing to represent a class of plaintiffs who were denied the same therapy as he was denied, and so that element of the claim survived the motion to dismiss. 8. Rulings Granting Class Certification Over Standing And Related Challenges Defendants in putative ERISA class actions in 2023 persisted in their efforts to challenge the plaintiffs’ claims and certification efforts on standing grounds, arguing that the plaintiffs could not assert breaches of fiduciary duty in connection with the management of defined contribution plans unless they had personally invested in the challenged investment options. In so doing, the defendants argued both that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they suffered no injury with respect to funds in which they were not invested, and that the plaintiffs could not establish typicality under Rule 23(a) for the same reason. Consistent with rulings in prior years, however, many courts rejected these arguments, reasoning that where the plaintiffs assert that the defendants’ conduct caused a common injury, the requirements of standing and typicality have been met for the class wide injury asserted. In 2023, courts considered two approaches to determining whether class representatives had standing - the class certification approach and the standing approach, as explicated in Angell, et al. v. Geico Advantage Insurance Co. , 67 F.4th 727, 734-35 (5th Cir. 2023). Under the former, class representatives must have only similar injuries, not identical ones; under the standing approach, class representatives have to suffer the same exact injury as the class members. Chavez, et al. v. Plan Benefit Services, 77 F.4th 370 (5th Cir. 2023). While some circuits decided long ago which approach to use, others, like the Fifth Circuit, have struggled in deciding which to apply. In Re Asacol Antitrust Litigation , 907 F.3d 42, 49 (1st Cir. 2018) (class certification approach); Fox, et al. v. Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., LLC , 977 F.3d 1039, 1046 (11th Cir. 2020) (standing approach). In Chavez, et al. v. Plan Benefit Services, 77 F.4th 370 (5th Cir. 2023), the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court ’ s certification of the plaintiffs’ class without selecting an approach to determining class representative

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