Court Opinion

ID: 9742493
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:15:01.110753+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:08:47.165156
License: Public Domain

*586Sievers, Judge,
concurring.
While I concur in the result reached by my colleagues, I take this opportunity to explain that I view the law on the issue presented in this appeal differently than do my colleagues. My point of departure is that my colleagues apparently read the authority so that the inquiry into the parties’ intent is limited to the contents of the divorce decree and/or property settlement.-1 believe that close scrutiny of the leading Nebraska case, Pinkard v. Confederation Life Ins. Co., 264 Neb. 312, 647 N.W.2d 85 (2002), and its main underpinning, Larsen v. Northwestern Nat. Life Ins., 463 N.W.2d 777 (Minn. App. 1990), reveals that the inquiry into intent extends beyond the divorce documents and includes facts and events occurring after the divorce. And, in my view, such facts often are far more revealing of the parties’ intent than the language of the divorce decree or property settlement agreement.
The majority opinion has already dissected the Pinkard decision in some detail, and thus, I focus on Larsen v. Northwestern Nat. Life Ins., supra, given our court’s use of the Minnesota Court of Appeals decision. The Minnesota court addressed the question of who was the proper recipient of the proceeds of a life insurance policy following the death of the insured. In Larsen, the court explained:
Ordinarily, marriage dissolution does not affect the right of the named beneficiary. When an insured does not change the beneficiary of his or her life insurance policy after a marriage dissolution, the ex-spouse beneficiary is entitled to the proceeds of the policy upon the death of the insured. This rule is based on the notion that the beneficiary’s claim to the proceeds evolves from the terms of the policy rather than the status of the marital relationship. . . .
However, under certain circumstances the ex-spouse beneficiary may have surrendered his or her right by a property settlement, which may or may not have been incorporated into the dissolution decree. . . . “Whether a property settlement agreement should be deemed to bar the [ex-spouse beneficiary’s right to the insurance proceeds] is a question of the construction of the agreement itself. Where there is no provision that the effecting of the settlement agreement
*587should deprive her of her rights as named beneficiary and she in fact remains named as beneficiary, the settlement agreement will not be given broader scope than its express terms specify.”
Id. at 779-80 (citations omitted). In finding that the former spouse in Larsen was not entitled to the proceeds of the life insurance policy, the Minnesota Court of Appeals said:
Although neither the stipulation nor the dissolution decree specifically referred to the beneficiary designation of decedent’s life insurance policy, we believe the references in the decree and stipulation granting “all right, title and interest [in those life insurance policies covering his or her respective life]” contemplated rights beyond the cash surrender value of the policy or the right merely to receive physical delivery of the policy.
Id. at 780 (emphasis in original).
However, the Minnesota court neither acknowledges nor discusses the fact that the most significant right for a policy owner, often more valued than the cash surrender value, is the right to leave the death benefit to a person or entity of the policy owner’s choosing. Notably, in Larsen, the divorce documents were completely silent on this point. With all due respect to the Minnesota court, I submit that the court simply made the language of the divorce stipulation that each party was awarded “all right, title and interest” in the policy into a beneficial interest waiver. The Minnesota court did this without explaining how an unmentioned waiver was present and without discussing the obvious fact that finding a waiver may well frustrate the owner’s true intent with respect to the death benefit, because the court was effectively voiding a contract — of which the policy’s named beneficiary is a third-party beneficiary.
With what I perceive as shortcomings of the Larsen decision noted, I find great significance in the fact that the Larsen court went well outside the language of the divorce documents by reciting facts that clearly justified the fiction that there was a waiver in the divorce documents. The Minnesota court justified the finding of a waiver in the divorce documents by citing from the record several key pieces of evidence as follows: (1) the wife had inquired of her counsel about changing beneficiary *588designations, but was told by her counsel to wait until the dissolution was final; (2) the wife was killed in an automobile accident just 50 days after the entry of the final dissolution decree; and (3) there was evidence that the wife’s intent was that in the event of her death, she wanted her property to go to her mother. Thus, I suggest that the Minnesota court’s finding of a waiver in Larsen was really the result of looking beyond the divorce documents in order to ascertain that the wife’s true intent was that her former husband not be her beneficiary and that while saying there was a waiver, the court was in reality simply giving effect to the wife’s intent as revealed by collateral facts.
This quite naturally takes me to the Pinkard court’s admonition that “[ejach case must be evaluated based upon the facts indicating the parties’ intent.” Pinkard v. Confederation Life Ins. Co., 264 Neb. 312, 318, 647 N.W.2d 85, 89 (2002). This statement, by its terms, does not limit the evaluation of intent to that derived solely from the divorce documents. However, I respectfully note that the quoted admonition can be seen as lacking consistency with another statement from the Pinkard opinion, as follows:
[W]e believe that the focus of the inquiry should be upon the language of the dissolution decree and any agreement which sets forth the intentions of the parties concerning property rights. If the dissolution decree and any property settlement agreement incorporated therein manifest the parties’ intent to relinquish all property rights, then such agreement should be given that effect.
Id. (emphasis supplied).
Therefore, I respectfully suggest that the Pinkard opinion leaves open the question of whether the search for intent is limited to the divorce documents or whether the search can properly extend to collateral facts. However, as said, it is significant that the Larsen decision, cited by the Pinkard court, obviously considered and used the collateral facts to find that the wife’s intent was that her former spouse would not be her policy’s beneficiary, even though he was still so named at the time of her untimely and unexpected death.
I briefly note the dissent in Strong v. Omaha Constr. Indus. Pension Plan, 270 Neb. 1, 701 N.W.2d 320 (2005), a decision
*589discussed by the majority opinion. Justice Connolly’s dissent, in which Justice Stephan joined, disagreed with the majority’s decision to adopt the waiver rule instead of relying upon the plan-documents rule. Notably, Justice Connolly summarized the myriad of tests that have been developed for determining whether language in a divorce decree was sufficient to act as a waiver and concluded that “the waiver rule has not resulted in the predicted uniformity, but instead has provided an array of muddled and sometimes contradictory precedents.” Id. at 18, 701 N.W.2d at 333. Justice Connolly further wrote that he joined the opinion in Pinkard, which he said “holds that for non-ERISA investments and insurance policies, a beneficiary interest can be waived in a divorce decree,” because of “individual fairness.” Strong v. Omaha Constr. Indus. Pension Plan, 270 Neb. at 18, 701 N.W.2d at 334.
Therefore, I respectfully submit that current Nebraska precedent set forth in Pinkard v. Confederation Life Ins. Co., 264 Neb. 312, 647 N.W.2d 85 (2002), leaves the question open as to where the courts may properly search for the parties’ intent — just the divorce documents or also the collateral facts. As a result, while I agree with my colleagues that the divorce documents in the instant case do not manifest either Maxson’s intent that Roberts, his former wife, not be his beneficiary (even if she is named in the policy as beneficiary) or Roberts’ waiver of her right to receive the policy proceeds if she is named as beneficiary. However, I would go further than my colleagues and look to the collateral facts, which leave no doubt on this record that Maxson intended that Roberts be his beneficiary. By looking to the divorce documents and the collateral facts, I suggest we achieve an approach to these cases that does not resort to legal fictions by crafting waivers which are not stated in the documents and that instead provides more comfort that the result is more likely to be reflective of what the deceased policy owner truly intended. In searching for the policy owners’ real intention, which to me is the decisive factor, we should remember how simple it is to write into the settlement agreement or the decree a provision that each former spouse gives up any claim to the death proceeds, regardless of the policy’s beneficiary designation.
*590In the case before us, when the collateral facts in the record are added to the lack of waiver language in the divorce documents, the result is abundantly clear. Remembering the admonition from the majority opinion in Pinkard that “[ejach case must be evaluated based upon the facts indicating the parties’ intent,” 264 Neb. at 318, 647 N.W.2d at 89, the key collateral fact here is that Maxson did not in the 11 years after the divorce became final change the named beneficiary on his policy — even though, as the policy owner, he had the right to do so — to effect such a change if that was his intent. From the undisputed facts, viewing them in the light most favorable to Roberts — as I must do on review of a grant of summary judgment — the only reasonable inference is that Maxson’s intent was that his named beneficiary, Roberts, his former wife, was to receive the life insurance proceeds upon his death. Therefore, I join in the reversal of the grant of summary judgment to the estate.