Employment — ERISA

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Employment — ERISA

Where a beneficiary offered no evidence of reasonable reliance on absent information in a notice, summary judgment was properly granted to the defendant on her ERISA action.        “[E]ven assuming the worst about Reliance’s process— as Schorsch claims, the company ‘basically lied in its June 13, 2006 letter’ that it performed a vocational assessment and that Reliance actually based its decision on the surveillance report as opposed to her medical information — Schorsch fails to show how she reasonably relied on those alleged misrepresentations. She claims she would have immediately contested the decision had she known the circumstances behind the vocational assessment or that Dr. Tuttle thought she ran a babysitting business from her home. But this after-the-fact claim does not show that had she known these alleged defects in Reliance’s review process, she would have acted differently. Schorsch could have raised these alleged defects in the administrative review process.”

Affirmed.

10-3524 Schorsch v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Gettleman, J., Tinder, J.