Black v. Long Term Disability Insurance

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that it was appropriate to rely on the consulting physicians’ conclusions regarding the employee’s disability status as they “presented thorough and reasonable explanations” for them
• explaining that the Social Security Administration’s disability determination is not dispositive where “the Social Security Act’s disability standard is different from that in the ERISA plan”
• observing that the insurer reasonably rejected the SSA’s disability finding because “the SSA did not review the same information that [the administrator] obtained from its consulting physicians”
• stating in the ERISA context that the Federal Rules of Evidence do not apply and the court “review[s] the entire administrative record, including hearsay evidence relied upon by the administrator.”
• “The Federal Rules of Evidence . . . do not apply to an ERISA administrator’s benefits determination, and we review the administrative record[.]”
• “While we must take [the plan’s] conflict of interest into account, [the plan administrator] remains entitled to the deference normally afforded under the arbitrary and capricious standard.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).