Ex-professional football players have filed a motion to compel discovery in a class action that accuses NFL’s employee welfare benefit plans of withholding disability benefits.
The motion in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore, requested that the defendants produce documents such as physician reports and decision letters, which communicated benefit claim approvals or denials to claimants, to prove that the NFL’s plans consistently refused to approve National Football League players’ valid disability benefit claims and violated the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by breaching their fiduciary duties to retired players.
According to court records, the defendants disputed the necessity of the requests, stating they were “overly broad and unduly burdensome at this stage in the litigation, where the Court has not certified a class.”
Plaintiffs’ counsel includes Seeger Weiss, Aylstock, Witkin, Kreis & Overholtz, Athlaw, Migliaccio & Rathod and Advocate Law Group. Seeger Weiss previously helped to negotiate a $1 billion settlement fund for more than 20,000 plaintiffs who experienced head trauma as a result of their football careers in the notorious NFL concussion litigation.
“We filed this motion to fully pull back the curtain on benefit plans that systematically penalize chronically disabled NFL players,” said Samuel Katz, co-lead attorney for the plaintiffs and founder of sports law firm Athlaw, in a statement emailed to Law.com.
“We are asking the court to order the defendants to produce their own records because they will demonstrate what we already believe to be true: that the NFL Disability & Survivor Benefit Plan and its fiduciaries have breached their duties of loyalty and care to disabled former NFL players under federal law and wrongfully denied former NFL players the benefits they are entitled to under the plain terms of the plans. We will continue to do everything we can to expose and correct this broken and unfair system and to hold the NFL Plan and its fiduciaries fully accountable.”
10 ex-NFL players filed the original complaint against the NFL Disability & Survivor Benefit Plan, the NFL Player Disability & Neurocognitive Benefit Plan (referred to collectively as “the Plan”), the Plan’s administrative board and the board’s members—including NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—on Feb. 9, 2023. The claim states that the players’ allegations join a mounting suite of ERISA claims litigated against the defendants in federal courts across the country. A second amended complaint was filed on May 12, 2023 after the NFL moved to dismiss the suit.
According to the plaintiffs, the defendants engaged in a “repeated, willful, and systematic pattern of breaching their fiduciary duty of loyalty through affirmative misrepresentations, hostile and adversarial positions, bad faith, active concealment, and by otherwise failing to discharge their duties solely and exclusively in the interest of disabled retired NFL Players and their beneficiaries.”
Additionally, they said, doctors designated as “neutral physicians,” who evaluated former players’ eligibility for disability benefits, were in fact hired by the plan’s board and benefited financially from denying coverage to applicants—citing an example of one physician who allegedly received $1.1 million from the plan.
“… [T]he requested discovery could reasonably lead to probative evidence on which particular Plan-hired physicians’ ‘views’ were commissioned
by the Board to support desired outcomes as part of Defendants’ ‘repeated refusal to pay contractually authorized benefits [that] has been willful and part of a larger systematic breach of its fiduciary obligations on a plan-wide basis,'” argued the plaintiffs in the motion to compel discovery.
The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Julie Rebecca Rubin, was referred to Magistrate Judge Erin Aslan on Dec. 30, 2024. An in-person status conference and hearing on the motion has been scheduled for Jan. 16.
According to Athlaw’s website, a trial date for the case is set for June.
The NFL, the NFL Disability & Survivor Benefit Plan and the Plan’s counsel at Groom Law Group and O’Melveny & Myers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.