A recent New Jersey Law Journal story, “Third Circuit OKs ERISA Attorney Fees Under Catalyst Theory,” reports that the U.S. Court Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled that attorney fees may be awarded in Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) cases under the catalyst theory, which entitles plaintiffs to fees where the pressure of a lawsuit causes a defendant to voluntarily change its conduct.

In a nonprecedential ruling in Boyle v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 863 Welfare Fund, a panel led by Judge Jane Richard Roth, and including Judge Thomas I. Vanaskie and Joseph A. Greenway Jr., reversed a New Jersey district judge’s ruling that the ERISA statute does not permit attorney fee awards under the catalyst theory.  In doing so, the court awarded attorney fees to plaintiffs Allen Boyle and Michael Luongo, despite upholding the lower court’s ruling granting summary to the defendants.

Roth pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Insurance, in which it found that the ERISA statute gives district courts broad discretion to award attorney fees to plaintiffs.  The Hardt court said the ERISA statute does not limit attorney fee awards to ‘”prevailing parties,’” but instead allows parties that show ‘”some degree of success on the merits’” beyond a ‘”trivial success on the merits or purely procedural victory’” to recoup fees, according to Roth.

Roth found that while Boyle and Luongo did not prevail in the case, they achieved some success with their lawsuit by promoting their former employer to voluntarily offer to retroactively reinstate benefits to early retirees and to reimburse them for any alternative coverage they may have purchased during the four-month period in 2011 when benefits ceased.

“We hold that in light of the Supreme Court’s clear rejection of the ‘prevailing party’ standard in Hardt, the catalyst theory remains viable under ERISA,” Roth said.