Barnhart v. Unum Life Insurance Co. of America

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding when an entity funds a plan and is also the plan administrator there is a rebuttable presumption of a palpable conflict of interest
• holding a claimant must do more than make unsubstantiated assertions to prove a palpable conflict of interest or serious procedural irregularity
• refusing to apply the sliding scale approach where conflicted administrator had both a physical therapist and physician perform independent evaluations of claimant
• to show serious breach of administrator’s fiduciary duty caused by a conflict of interest, conflict of interest must be shown to have a connection with the substantive decision reached

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).