Companies around the U.S. have recently seen a barrage of cases alleging that notices required under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) fail to provide all information required by COBRA. Class action cases filed against high-visibility defendants in Georgia, Michigan, Florida, and elsewhere allege the companies violated federal law when they sent purportedly inaccurate, threatening, or confusing notices of former employees' rights to elect to continue medical-insurance coverage after their employment ended.

Under COBRA, election notices must contain information including a mailing address for payments, the identity of the plan administrator, an explanation of how to enroll, and a physical form to elect coverage. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) provides a model COBRA notice template, updated in 2020, which contains these items. Yet few companies use DOL's model COBRA notice, for several reasons:

• Most companies contract with third-party vendors, who design and provide their own notices to covered persons experiencing a qualifying event, such as job separation.
  

• These vendors often omit the plan administrator's name to avoid confusion, because the payments must be mailed to the third-party vendor.
  

• Many items specified in the DOL model notice are often unknown (and therefore omitted) at the time notice is given. The resulting litigation is directed at the employer or plan sponsor as the defendant, but not the vendor whose election notice is...

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