The Policy With No Beneficiary at All
A man spent most of his career at a large bank. He carried life insurance and accidental death coverage through his employer worth $350,000 combined. When he died he had never filled out a beneficiary form for either one.
He left behind the woman he had lived with for decades. They owned a house together. They shared a bank account. He had named her on other benefits at work. They had never held a wedding.
His parents filed a claim for the money.
Michael Young represented the surviving partner.
What decided it
Employer benefit plans are governed by ERISA, and an ERISA plan carries its own rules for who gets paid. This plan said that if no beneficiary was named, the insurer decided, and it placed a spouse or domestic partner ahead of parents. The plan also spelled out what a domestic partner was: living together, financially interdependent, joint accounts or joint property, named on each other’s benefit forms.
The insurer looked at that record and concluded she qualified. It denied the parents’ claim. The parents appealed the denial, the insurer filed an interpleader, and the money went into the registry of the federal court.
At the same time the parents were fighting a second battle in probate court over whether the couple had a common law marriage. A jury found they did. The parents appealed that finding and asked the federal judge to wait for the court of appeals before deciding anything.
The federal court did not wait. Under ERISA a court looks to the plan documents and stops there. Whether she was a common law wife under Texas law was a separate question in a separate court, and the answer could not change what the plan said. The insurer had discretion, it exercised that discretion on real evidence, and that ended the inquiry.
The result
Summary judgment for our client on the disputed plan benefits. The court held that even if the parents won their state appeal and the common law marriage finding was reversed, the outcome under the plan would be the same.
The parties later mediated the remaining disputes between them. The parents received other assets. Our client kept the full $350,000 in plan benefits.
N.D. Tex., Dallas Division, Civil Action No. 3:24-cv-1520-X.
If you were not married to him
Unmarried partners lose these fights constantly, usually because no one reads the plan. When an employer policy has no named beneficiary, the payout order sits in a document most families never see, and it often includes a domestic partner category with a checklist you may already satisfy. A joint account. A shared mortgage. A beneficiary form on a retirement plan. Parents and siblings frequently claim this money on the assumption that no marriage means no claim. That assumption is wrong often enough to be worth fighting.
