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Plaintiffs use RICO to surmount difficulties in bad-faith cases.

Publication: Trial
Publication Date: 01-JUL-03
Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access

Article Excerpt
For plaintiff lawyers lost in the desert of ERISA, another acronym may offer hope on the horizon: RICO.

It is too early to tell whether that hope is merely a mirage, but in the past five years, lawyers in a handful of bad-faith cases have turned to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act as a way around the often cumbersome constraints posed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

In May, a federal judge in New Jersey heard arguments on whether to allow Richard Weiss to use RICO against First Unum Life, which is a subsidiary of UnumProvident Corp., the nation's largest disability-income insurer. (Weiss v. First Unum Life, No. 02-4249 (D.N.J. May 5, 2003).) To date, no federal court has al]owed RICO to be introduced in a bad-faith case, but several suits invoking the stature have been settled out of court. In one recent...

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