Know Your Judge: T.S. Ellis III

This week in Know Your Judge, we feature Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Ellis, born in Bogotá, Colombia, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and took senior status in 2007. Ellis earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering at Princeton University and obtained a law degree from Harvard Law School. Before joining the bench he was a partner at law firm Hunton & Williams LLP.

Ellis made headlines last week for his skeptical comments as the judge presiding over criminal charges brought by special prosecutor Robert Mueller against Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump.

To employee benefit practitioners, Ellis might be better known fordenying class statusto former Computer Sciences Corp. executives who challenged an amendment to the company’s deferred compensation plan that affected their payment distribution. In another benefits ruling, Ellis held thatMetLife didn’t owelife insurance benefits to the ex-wife of a deceased Exxon Mobil Corp. employee who failed to properly designate her as his sole beneficiary.

Statistics & Numbers

Ellis usually dismisses or partially dismisses employment discrimination, labor, and benefits cases. He has fully denied less than a third of the employment, labor, and benefits lawsuits in his docket, according to Bloomberg Law Litigation Analytics.

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Ellis’ rulings on employment discrimination, benefits, and labor disputes are usually affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—the appeals court that reviews decisions from district courts in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Only three of Ellis’ decisions involving employment and labor issues have been fully reversed by the Fourth Circuit.

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Ellis’ dockets move very fast since he usually takes only about six months to resolve labor, employment, and benefits disputes. On average, it took Ellis:

• 138 days to resolve 186 Employee Retirement Income Security Act lawsuits;

• 145 days to close six labor disputes;

• 162 days to dispose of 95 wage and hour cases;

• 195 days to resolve 24 lawsuits involving disability discrimination claims; and

• 210 days to resolve 159 employment discrimination lawsuits.

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Looking for more analytics on judges? Check back each Wednesday for our Know Your Judge feature, or tryBloomberg Law’s Litigation Analytics. And contact us if there’s a judge you want us to feature.

To contact the reporter on this story: Carmen Castro-Pagan in Washington atccastro-pagan@bloomberglaw.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jo-el J. Meyer atjmeyer@bloomberglaw.com; Martha Mueller Neff atmmuellerneff@bloomberglaw.com