Law360 (August 29, 2025, 4:54 PM EDT) — Yellow Corp. seeks to revive a $137 million breach dispute against the Teamsters at the Tenth Circuit, married retirees will ask the Eleventh Circuit to restart a pension conversion fight, and the en banc Fifth Circuit reconsiders a challenge to a rule implementing a 2020 surprise health billing law.
Here are four appellate argument sessions in September that benefits attorneys may want to track.
Yellow Seeks 10th Circ. Revival of $137M Teamsters Fight
Yellow Corp. will ask the Tenth Circuit to revive its $137 million suit against the Teamsters alleging the union breached a labor contract when it held up a corporate restructuring, which a Kansas federal judge tossed in March 2024 in favor of parties pursuing a grievance process.
A three-judge panel has set arguments for Sept. 9 in Yellow’s appeal seeking to revive allegations that the Teamsters National Freight Industry Negotiating Committee and union locals drove the company into bankruptcy when they wouldn’t support a business restructuring proposal until wage increases were implemented.
Yellow, which first sued the Teamsters in 2023, argues on appeal that breach of contract claims in its suit aren’t subject to the grievance process in the National Master Freight Agreement and that the lower court should have allowed an amended complaint.
Meanwhile, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, its local affiliates and the Teamsters National Freight Industry Negotiating Committee argue on appeal that a lower court correctly ruled that language in the contract required Yellow pursuing a grievance over breach claims.
Yellow also argued in a reply brief filed with the appellate court in December that the lower court was wrong to hold that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters organization was subject to the National Master Freight Agreement, which was between Yellow and individual Teamsters locals.
“The true significance of IBT not being a party to the NMFA is that Yellow and IBT had no agreement to grieve any dispute between them and Yellow’s claims against IBT should not have been dismissed for failure to exhaust grievance procedures,” Yellow’s reply said.
The case is Yellow Corp. et al. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters et al., case number 24-3111, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Utility Co. Retirees’ Mortality Table Fight at 11th Circ.
An Eleventh Circuit panel on Sept. 17 will consider whether to revive a proposed class action federal benefits lawsuit from married utility company retirees who alleged their pension benefits were lowballed due to outdated mortality tables used in conversions.
The proposed class of Southern Company pension plan participants, led by ex-workers William Drummond and Richard Odom, appealed after a U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones in July 2024 dismissed the suit for failure to state a claim.
The case is one of several Employee Retirement Income Security Act proposed class actions that are percolating through the district and appellate courts challenging employers’ assumptions used to convert pension benefits from single-life annuity to joint-and-survivor annuity form.
ERISA requires companies that dispense retirement benefits in JSA form to provide a pension “which is the actuarial equivalent of a single annuity for the life of the participant,” according to the statute. But that isn’t clearly defined in statute and parties dispute what that means in these cases. Retirees typically argue that benefits converted using unreasonable and outdated mortality assumptions aren’t actuarially equivalent under the law, while employers often counter that their methodology is proper because actuarial equivalency is a term defined in the plan that they followed.
In the Sixth Circuit, an appellate panel in May appeared skeptical of a Michigan federal judge’s holding that unreasonable actuarial assumptions were allowed in his decision tossing pension conversion suits against Kellogg and FedEx in 2024.
In a sign of the potential impact of the case, the U.S. Department of Labor filed an amicus brief in the case in December that favored Southern Company retirees’ pension suit revival bid, arguing that current and reasonable assumptions were required under ERISA. That DOL brief was later cited in the Kellogg workers’ appeal.
Employer-side attorney Anne Tyler Hall, managing partner at Hall Benefits Law, said “I think there will be a ripple effect” from the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in the appeal that could impact other litigation challenging employers’ definitions of actuarial equivalency.
“Upholding the lower court’s decision would help, in this case, maintain predictability in benefit liabilities and flexibility in plan design, which are core tenants of the statute,” Hall said.
Andrew Oringer, partner and general counsel at the Wagner Law Group and an employer-side benefits attorney, agreed the Eleventh Circuit appeal was worth watching: “The courts have been fairly inconsistent regarding actuarial assumptions, particularly given differing factual nuances, so it’s worthwhile how any particular case, including this one, comes out,” he said.
The case is William Drummond et al. v. Southern Company Services Inc. et al., case number 24-12773, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Full 5th Circ. Rehears No Surprises Act Rule Challenge
The Fifth Circuit on Sept. 24 has scheduled an en banc rehearing in a challenge to the 2020 No Surprises Act, which set up an arbitration system between insurers and providers for out-of-network claim disputes in an effort to reduce patients’ surprise medical bills.
The full appellate court agreed to rehear the case en banc in May after a three-judge panel largely upheld the law in 2024, concluding agencies complied with the Administrative Procedure Act when finalizing a rule on how to calculate payment amounts in an independent dispute resolution process known as IDR.
The consolidated Administrative Procedure Act suit is led by the Texas Medical Association, which represents more than 50,000 doctors and medical students in the Lone Star state. Patients seek to revive their suit alleging that the government unlawfully promulgated a July 2021 rule in connection with the act, which went into effect in January 2022. The federal government also cross-appealed the district court’s ruling.
The rule challenged in the suit specifically dealt with methodology related to what’s called the qualified payment amount or QPA used to determine compensation rates for a given provider subject to the IDR process.
Numerous employer-side benefits attorneys said they’re keeping an eye on the proceedings given the implications for health plans subject to the IDR process, including Erin Weber, a partner in Winston & Strawn LLP’s employee benefits and executive compensation practice group, who said the case was “important to watch.”
“IDR has become wildly popular, with providers initiating the vast majority of the arbitrations and winning the vast majority of the decisions. Yet the providers are the ones bringing suit here, arguing that the award calculations should be more favorable to them,” Weber said.
Weber said she’s also watching to see how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v.Raimondo , which upended the so-called Chevron doctrine handing deference to federal agencies to interpret statutes, impacts the appellate court’s analysis.
“How much deference will the court give the government agencies versus taking the lead in interpreting the language of the statute?” Weber said.
Alden Bianchi, counsel at McDermott Will & Emery LLP and an employer-side attorney, agreed the case was a critical one for benefits attorneys to watch given the impact on health plans arbitrating out-of-network claim disputes with providers using the IDR process. Bianchi also voiced skepticism that the appellate court would do much to untangle an already complicated situation.
“This has gotten to be such a morass… if they reverse it, it’s just going to amplify the confusion. But I’m not sure [that] it’ll materially add to the confusion, because it’s already crazy,” Bianchi said, referring to the en banc court’s ultimate decision in the case and its impact on the IDR process.
Bianchi added that he was hopeful that Congress might take action to address issues with the NSA, pointing to a recent study published in the journal Health Affairs earlier this month that showed the IDR process subject to the law incurred an estimated $5 billion in costs from 2022 to 2024. The article was written by researchers from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
“This is on Congress’s radar screen,” Bianchi said.
The case is Texas Medical Association et al. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services et al., case number 23-40605, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Investors’ Yen-Libor Rigging Suit Back at 2nd Circ.
Institutional investors on Sept. 29 will again urge the Second Circuit to revive a lawsuit accusing Bank of America, UBS and others of violating antitrust law by rigging the interbank borrowing rate for Japanese yen, after a New York federal court ended the case in July 2024.
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System and a pair of investment funds, Hayman Capital Master Fund LP and Japan Macro Opportunities Master Fund LP, seek to restart their suit and lead a class of sophisticated investors alleging harm over derivatives they traded underpinned by the manipulated benchmark.
Investors first sued in July 2015, accusing the banks of conspiring to rig the London Interbank Offered Rate for
Japanese yen between 2006 and 2011. Libor was the benchmark used to determine the rate at which banks borrowed foreign currency from one another. CalPERS, an institutional investor that also traded derivatives subject to the suit’s antitrust claims, joined in an amended complaint in December 2015.
Libor was replaced with the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, after a number of rate-rigging scandals came to light, and some of the world’s largest banks paid billions in penalties to regulators in the United States and Europe to settle accusations that they participated in the market manipulation.
The Second Circuit already revived the case once in 2020, reversing a toss of the suit for lack of standing that a New York federal court had handed down in 2017.
The case is Sonterra Capital Master Fund Ltd. et al. v. UBS AG et al., case number 24-1954, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
–Editing by Amy Rowe and Nick Petruncio.
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