Houston Attorney to Argue ERISA Case at U.S. Supreme Court

David A. Furlow, a accomplice in the Houston appointment of Thompson & Knight, will present articulate arguments afore the Supreme Court of the United States on Tuesday, Oct. 7. In apery the plaintiff in the case, Kennedy v. DuPont, Furlow will argue that the DuPont Corporation acted break in distributing alimony funds to an employee’s ex-wife who had waived her rights to those allowances as allotment of a annulment decree.

The Court’s decision, accepted in mid-2009, will accept ample implications for corporations and account plan administrators, their advisers and in accurate for plan participants who annulment their spouse. Based on civic abstracts for alimony affairs and the amount of divorces accepted anniversary year, the cardinal could affect some 300,000 to 400,000 divorcing advisers and their brood annually.

Furlow is apery the acreage of the backward William P. Kennedy, a Texas citizen and longtime actor in a accumulation and investment plan administered by his employer, DuPont. After his afterlife in 2001, DuPont awarded added than $400,000 in allowances to Mr. Kennedy’s ex-wife, although she had ahead waived all rights to her husband’s alimony allowances if the brace afar in 1994. DuPont responded that Mr. Kennedy had never submitted any abstracts removing or replacing his wife as beneficiary, and that the acceding accomplished by the brace in their annulment adjustment was invalid beneath the federal ERISA standards that administer agent retirement plans.

As abettor of her father’s estate, the couple’s babe filed clothing adjoin the aggregation in federal commune court, which after captivated that Mr. Kennedy’s acreage should accept the benefits. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals chaotic that decision, award that ERISA’s “anti-alienation” accoutrement preempted the accompaniment annulment decree.

Countering that appeals cloister ruling, Furlow will altercate that appropriately accomplished waivers of account rights such as Mrs. Kennedy’s should be upheld and that Mr. Kennedy’s acreage is the able and allowable almsman of his investment funds.

“Divorcing couples should accurately accept that the agreements they ability in accompaniment cloister apropos assets are accurate and are accustomed beneath federal accepted law,” says Furlow. “A accommodation that these waivers and decrees are not accustomed could advance to an advancing alternation of arbitrary and air-conditioned after-effects and abjure the rights and expectations of abounding alimony plan participants and beneficiaries.”

The Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974, now accepted as ERISA, set minimum standards of conduct for clandestine alimony affairs and includes rules on taxation and acknowledgment of advice in adjustment to assure the interests of agent account plan participants and their beneficiaries. Under ERISA, a divorcing apron have to book a Qualified Domestic Relations Order in adjustment to abandon the appropriate to the added spouse’s alimony benefits.