Bell Lax acted for a client whose wife had sadly passed away. Our client’s wife had worked for a major insurance company for 20 years and had a pension with them. She had been dismissed while on maternity leave in 1992.
As she had not claimed her pension early, despite being terminally ill and incapacitated for the final 18 months of her life, the insurance company denied her husband the value of her spouse’s pension. This meant that the couple would not have been able to afford for their teenage son to go to university.
The couple had not realised that the wife had the option of electing to take her pension early in the event of incapacity. The insurance company’s policy had been to keep the pension policy documents at the company’s offices, and the brief “pension letter” that the insurance company had sent to our client’s wife in 1997 did not mention her right to take an early pension in the event of incapacity. Our client therefore argued that his wife could not have known all of the conditions of her pension, and that her employer had a duty to inform her of a pension benefit of which she could not realistically have known. Bell Lax argued that the employer’s failure to do so constituted a negligent misstatement.
The Defendant took a very narrow interpretation of the terms of the pension and argued that because the wife had not taken her pension early and had passed away before retirement age, Bell Lax’s client was not eligible to receive the spouse’s pension. It was necessary to consider case law, equity, and the commercial realities of the situation for both parties in order to reach a settlement.
Bell Lax settled this matter at mediation on favourable terms for our client. The couple’s son has been able to go on to the higher education that his parents had always wanted for him.
