‘An Incredible Amount of Expertise’

On Valentine’s Day weekend 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom directed city hall to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Teresa Renaker and her partner sent their 4-year-old daughter to a friend’s house so they could stand in a rainy, nine-hour line to get theirs.

On second thought, Renaker’s not sure if it was raining. But she laughs thinking about that cold February day. And, as an employee benefits lawyer, she laughs recalling one of the first things she did with that marriage license in hand: “I looked around and said, ‘Gosh, what can we be eligible for now?’”

One answer was a California Public Employees’ Retirement System long-term care plan, since her spouse worked for the University of California—coverage Renaker managed to secure before the state’s Supreme Court voided their license six months later. That brief 2004 marriage was one of the many legal iterations the couple’s union has taken over the years.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve been in three domestic partnerships and two marriages—all to the same woman and each carrying with it a different set of rights and obligations … including with respect to employee benefits,” she says. “One of the things that has really shaped my career as an employee benefits lawyer has been the rapidly evolving state of relationship recognition for same-sex couples. I’ve watched that evolution from a personal point of view, but also very much from a professional point of view.”

That’s because Renaker—who litigates ERISA plaintiff’s cases nationwide at the firm she built, Renaker & Scott—has, since the early 2000s, partnered with the National Center for Lesbian Rights to help clients who have been denied spousal benefits.

“She has been our go-to expert and partner whenever we are litigating cases, or advocating for people whose marriages or domestic partnerships are being ignored by companies or pension plans,” says Amy Whelan, a senior staff attorney at NCLR. “We’ve prevailed in every case Teresa has worked on, or we were able to settle the case on behalf of the person. She brings an incredible amount of expertise.”

That includes 2013’s Cozen O’Connor, P.C. v. Tobits, concerning whether the widow of a young lawyer who died of cancer could obtain the death benefit from her spouse’s profit-sharing plan. The case was litigated in federal courts in Pennsylvania, while the U.S. Justice Department and members of the U.S. House of Representatives weighed in—all the while the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.

“Even after DOMA was struck down, there were employers that had previously denied benefits under that law and continued to fight on—saying, ‘We’re not going to go back and give these benefits to these people.’ Teresa was fighting that,” Whelan says. “That’s what this work is focused on: making sure same-sex couples have the same financial security and predictability that other couples have to protect their families.”

Whelan adds that Renaker, whose work with NCLR has been largely pro bono, “could not be a more lovely or incredible colleague to work with. She is smart, strategic, and kind, and she is always generous with her time.”

Renaker’s interest in employee benefits began years before law school, when she was a “very low-level” manager at legal publisher Matthew Bender, attending trainings on topics like nondiscrimination or how to respond to the potential unionization of the copy editors she supervised.

A San Francisco native, she had returned to California after graduating from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. A copy editing position was what was available for a humanities grad in the Bay Area at the time, and Renaker intended to make a career in legal publishing.

Then, in 1993, she accepted a voluntary severance program so she could attend law school at Berkeley. Through Berkeley, Renaker clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Irma Gonzalez and worked on ERISA cases, including a preemption case involving the Department of Labor’s safe harbor regulations.
“It was really interesting to see how dynamic and unsettled this area of law was,” Renaker says, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court has heard more than two dozen ERISA preemption cases in the 50 years since the regulations were enacted. “It’s a very contested area.”

After law school, she joined Sigmund, Lewis and Feinberg in Oakland, which would become Lewis, Feinberg, Lee, Renaker & Jackson by the time she left to create her own firm in 2015. Though the firm is just Renaker and partner Kirsten Scott, the pair is able to “punch above our weight,” Renaker says, by partnering with other firms.

Currently, Renaker is litigating two cases with Kantor & Kantor’s Susan Meter: a class action against Northrop Grumman over allegedly misleading pension statements; and a Delaware ERISA case on behalf of du Pont family household workers who have not received the pension benefits they earned.

“We call ourselves female powerhouse ERISA attorneys,” says Meter. “Teresa is someone I look up to and admire, [someone] who has achieved what I hope to achieve as far as … her knowledge and experience, and the types of cases she’s done. I have a lot of admiration for her as a female ERISA attorney.”

Renaker has taught her how to write persuasive briefs, and how to stay strong and not back down. “There are times I feel run down and in the weeds of things, and Teresa will get you back on track,” Meter says. “She sticks to her guns, and she speaks with conviction. … It comes through as very credible.”
Clarissa Kang, of Trucker Huss, has defended ERISA cases opposite Renaker.

“In every dealing, she is very professional and very collegial, but you know she is advocating zealously for her client,” Kang says. “It’s wonderful to see a woman in such a high-profile role within the ERISA community, and I consider her among the best of the ERISA attorneys out there.”

Renaker has longstanding partnerships with groups like NCLR and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel.

“Our work with the AIDS Legal Referral Panel has put us in a position where we have clients who we have represented for 20 years,” Renaker says, “helping them maintain their disability benefits as a result of being long term survivors of HIV. … I lived through the ’80s in San Francisco and saw so many friends and acquaintances just wiped out. I’m incredibly grateful to work with long-term survivors who face a lot of issues arising from the fact that many of them became disabled in their 30s and are surviving on very limited incomes. Ensuring the continuity of their benefits is incredibly important.”

With NCLR, Renaker has fought for the civil rights of same-sex couples through decades of legal change. “We’ve been in this transitional period, and plans and participants don’t know what to do,” she says. “That’s been a through line from the pretty early years of my career to today.”

Her first case with NCLR was on behalf of a man seeking a surviving spouse pension after his spouse, a long-term union member, passed away. “This was a very long-standing relationship, 30 years I believe, and they had registered as domestic partners with the state of California. We asked that the plan recognize that,” says Renaker. “They initially denied the benefit on the basis that the plan didn’t provide benefits for registered domestic partners. But they amended their plan to make sure that the surviving registered domestic partner would receive that benefit.”

When asked how she’s convinced the union and other employers to change course, Renaker takes off her blue-framed glasses and considers.

“Most of the time, employers have wanted to do the right thing,” she says. “They have wanted to be able to provide these benefits equally. What these cases are about has been telling employers you really can safely do this for same-sex couples. I think most of the employers that I’ve dealt with … have been fearful of running afoul of federal law and losing tax advantages for their plans.”

Of course, not all matters resolve so easily.

In Reed v. KRON/IBEW Local 45 Pension Plan, Renaker sought a surviving spousal benefit for David Reed from the radio station where his late spouse, Donald Lee Gardner, had worked. When Gardner retired and commenced his pension in 2009, he had requested a joint survivor annuity for Reed, his registered domestic partner, but was denied under DOMA. So, he retired with a single life annuity.

By the time Gardner died in 2014, however, DOMA had been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. So, in 2016, Renaker argued that Reed should receive the benefit since, under California law, registered domestic partners have the same rights as married spouses. “We litigated the case and lost. The district court said the board of trustees had not abused its discretion in concluding that, because Mr. Gardner had retired before the Windsor decision, they would not provide a survivor’s benefit to a same sex-surviving spouse.”

In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision in Reed’s favor.
“When I argued the Reed case, I would not have expected to be needing to argue about the applicability of a law that had been struck down as unconstitutional six years earlier, but the ship doesn’t turn right away,” Renaker says. “It’s been a long adjustment period, and it’s still playing out; I’m still contacted by people in same-sex couples who have problems with their pensions or health benefits, even though civil marriage has been available to same-sex couples, nationwide, for almost a decade.”

Today, Renaker’s work includes two areas: cases arising from a misstatement of retirement benefits and cases arising from theft of retirement assets.

She characterizes the misstatement cases as drastic and devastating—“Nobody sues over a 1% discrepancy. We’re talking about discrepancies where benefits statements were off by 50% or failed to provide some other crucial piece of information about a pension benefit.”

Retirement asset thefts are a growing area wherein fraudsters convince a plan to distribute a benefit to the wrong person. “There’s been a lot of attention paid to data security, and rightly so,” says Renaker. “Unfortunately, there are situations where … plans are just getting that money out to participants quickly and efficiently, which is not the right priority. There needs to be a focus on making sure assets are distributed to the party that earned them and not to somebody who has bought that party’s social security number on the dark web.”

Renaker is unsure how much she’s recovered for clients over the years, but she takes pride in the fact that her class action results have been substantial on a per-class-member basis, and that, in the case of survivor’s pensions, she’s obtaining a reliable lifetime benefit.

“A client who recovers even $1,000 a month for the rest of their lives, that’s a useful amount of money to people,” she says. “I’m glad to be able to obtain those kinds of results.”