To Be or Not to Be (a Fiduciary, That Is)
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I talked about a case last week that addressed the damages aspect of making out a breach of fiduciary duty claim related to stock drop type issues, and pointed out the broad, ambiguous and easy to manipulate nature of a damages claim in that scenario. Another case last week, also out of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, points out that other aspects of making out a breach of fiduciary duty case on a class action basis based on the administration of 401(k) plans provide a real check on such cases. The issue in that case? Namely that not everyone involved in operating a 401(k) plan is a fiduciary, and that while deep pockets involved in allegedly inappropriate behavior with regard to such a plan may make tempting targets, they cannot be sued successfully for breach of fiduciary duty if the prerequisite of having acted as a fiduciary is not satisfied.
As Judge O’Toole’s opinion in Columbia Air Services v. Fidelity Management Trust Company illustrates, an administrator of a plan - and who is not a named fiduciary of the plan - is only a functional fiduciary with regard to those specific limited areas in which it exercised discretionary, decision making authority; alleged wrongdoing by it with regard to other areas of its work for the plan do not subject it to fiduciary liability because the administrator is not deemed to have been serving as a fiduciary in those other contexts, regardless of the fact that it served as a fiduciary for other purposes. Thus, in that case, claims that improper fees were paid to the administrator as part of the structure of the 401(k) plan it was administering could not be the basis for a breach of fiduciary duty class action, because that did not occur as part of the activity where the administrator was, in fact, a fiduciary. As a result, ERISA granted no avenue for redressing those allegations of improper fees being paid to the administrator as part of its work for the 401(k) plan in question.
Although, as I have discussed in the past and as is discussed as well in this interesting article here, ERISA is becoming a favored structure for bringing securities related class actions, as this case shows, there are hurdles to these types of claims as well, ones that should dissuade anyone who thinks that bringing a stock manipulation class action under ERISA rather than the securities laws themselves equates with shooting fish in a barrel.
On Backdating, ERISA, and the Possibly Unintended Consequences of the Diamond Hypothetical
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If you have an interest in both ERISA and in well written, logical judicial opinions, I can’t recommend highly enough this opinion, by Judge Gertner of the United States District Court for Massachusetts, in Bendaoud v. Hodgson, deciding a number of issues at the motion to dismiss stage. I have a trial starting on Monday, so, unfortunately, I can’t delve as deeply today into the range of issues the opinion discusses and that warrant comment as I would like, but a few issues are worth commenting on right off the bat, even in the limited time I have today.
First, I have discussed before the trend, which others are recognizing as well, of ERISA replacing securities law as a preferred structure for attacking stock drop and similar stock related manipulation type cases. Judge Gertner comes as close as anyone has to demonstrating in her opinion why this state of affairs has come to pass, in her analysis of standing and the question of whether the plaintiff, since he sold his stock holdings in the company plan before the stock manipulation in question came to light and drove down the stock price, could still show he suffered injury. The court found that the plaintiff could show injury by demonstrating that the alleged fiduciary breaches resulted in less profit than the plaintiff would have earned “had the funds been available for” other purposes than the investment made by the plaintiff. This is a pretty open damages theory, and not one as closely tied to the actual timing of disclosures and its impact on stock prices that the court recognizes would control the issue if it were more of a traditional stock manipulation securities action.
Second, the case raises questions about whether, after Justice Breyer’s famous diamond hypothetical in LaRue, a single plan participant can actually sue for losses to the plan anymore in defined contribution cases, if the diamond that was lost did not actually come from that participant’s account (or safe deposit box, in the terms of the hypothetical). The court suggests that such a plan participant may not seek recovery for the other plan members on his or her own, but that instead a class action structure may be required.
And finally, reading the court’s opinion and the analysis of the damages issue, I couldn’t help but think of the LA Times ESOP case that I discussed here and my thought that, regardless of the merits of that particular case, it certainly illustrated the risks of using ESOP held stock in corporate transactions, because the interests of those pursuing the transaction, while not by definition wrong in any way, may not line up perfectly with the best interests of the employees holding that stock in the ESOP, raising risks of breach of fiduciary duty. The damages analysis in Bendaoud goes right to this point; under that analysis, the issue is not whether the stock holding employees made out okay in the deal, but whether the ESOP assets would have been worth more had the stock been used in a different manner or different transaction. That analysis suggests a broad range of attacks on a complicated ESOP implicating transaction such as that in the LA Times case.
Fiduciary Duties: It Ain't Easy
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With regard to my post yesterday about fiduciaries having the power, authority and motivation to act to protect plan participants, of course, that’s a lot easier for a fiduciary to do if its vendors are giving it advance notice of losses before the rest of the market finds out, and a lot harder to do if a fiduciary is one of the vast majority who aren’t given that advantage. See this story right here. A little less flippantly, this story - of alleged advantageous information given to some customers in advance of disclosure to the market as a whole - goes right to why its easy to say (as class action complaints always do) that fiduciaries owe a high duty of care to protect plan assets and beneficiaries, but it isn’t all that easy for fiduciaries to actually do.
Joshua Itzoe on Fixing the 401(k)
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In an odd coincidence, at the same time Wall Street has been imploding, laying bare valuation and other problems with investments in retirement plans and elsewhere, I happen to have been reading independent fiduciary/401(k) advisor Joshua Itzoe’s book, Fixing the 401(k), which is premised on the idea that 401(k) plans are compromised by inherent, systemic problems, ranging from issues in plan design to the significant impact of fees charged against plan assets (Susan Mangiero, who knows as much as anyone around about valuation, fee, and other issues impacting pension investments, has a valuable review of Joshua’s book here). I hope to return to some specific chapters in the book and discuss them in detail and in the context of the types of cases that I see and that appear on the court dockets, but for now what struck me most was the extent to which the problem that Joshua identifies as needing to be fixed is really one of fiduciary talent and application; excessive fees that decrease performance, poor investment choice selection, and controlling plan costs - all items that he identifies as systemic problems at this point in the 401(k) regime - are all issues that are or should be right in the wheelhouse of plan sponsors and fiduciaries. They alone, either on their own or by exercise of their authority to bring in outside expertise, are in the position and have the authority to protect plan participants against essentially every one of these problems; further, by operation of the liability imposed on them for failing to do so, they are the one and only players in the system who both have the power to address these issues and the legal incentives to do so. Plan participants have neither the power, responsibility nor authority to do so, and outside vendors - particularly ones who do not rise to the level of a fiduciary or who will at least argue that they do not - likewise may lack, at a minimum, the incentives to address these problems. The Wall Street implosion just drives these points home further; fiduciaries alone are in a position to protect plan participants from the pressures and potentially explosive risks in retirement investing by means of company plans such as 401(k)s, and there really isn’t anyone else with the authority, power or interest in doing so. Indeed, at heart, isn’t this really what a breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit really is - a claim that the only party in a position to put the participants’ needs first, didn’t?
Does a Dying Industry Guarantee Pension Litigation?
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This is one of those days in which the possible blog topics come fast and furious, many of them driven by the once every hundred years or so events on Wall Street and what they tell us about both the obligations of fiduciaries of retirement plans and their concomitant ability to live up to those obligations. That may or may not be a story that can be covered adequately in the blog format, but at least some of the highlights of those issues may make for some posts along the way. For today though, I thought I would focus on something a little more concrete, namely the LA Times/ESOP/ERISA /breach of fiduciary duty case that I blogged about in my last post. Here is a nice article giving a little more context to the suit, and which is probably worth a read if you have an interest in ESOPs, ERISA, newspapers or all of the above. One thing in particular caught my eye in the article, which relates to its discussion of the underlying problems in the newspaper industry and how it relates to the lawsuit; one of the class plaintiffs comments that those problems are not with the product turned out by the reporters, but with the industry’s difficulties with “monetizing the product online.” As someone who used to read three newspapers a day in law school and now skims three or more a day on-line and on my blackberry without spending a dime for the content, I can only say amen to that. I am not sure, though, that this point really has anything to do with the validity or viability of the suit itself, other than to the extent of pointing out the underlying problems that gave rise to the transaction that allegedly harmed the ESOP participants and gave rise to the class action. Either way, the story illustrates an important point, which is that there is a need for caution in any transaction of this nature that is going to impact the dollar value of stock held in ESOP plans, in light of fiduciary obligations that run in tandem with such plans.
ERISA, ESOP and the LA Times
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What happens when journalists, Sam Zell, ERISA and employee stock ownership plans collide? Well, at a minimum, you get a really interesting and well written complaint alleging breach of fiduciary duty under ERISA. Here is the WSJ Law Blog post on this, and thanks to the post, here is the complaint itself. A couple of brief thoughts off the top of my head. First, this case fits in nicely with the trend that I have discussed in the past on this blog, which concerns the replacement of the securities laws with ERISA as the preferred means of attacking large scale corporate transactions. Second, like most such complaints filed as potential class actions, the complaint tells a wonderful story. As a litigator, I often wonder who is the target audience for these types of dramatically written pleadings, as a jury will never see them (not that any cases like this ever reach trial or, if they do, before a jury) and I am hard pressed to think that judges pay much attention to them when it comes time to consider the merits of a case. And third, if there is any fire behind the smoke that makes up the complaint’s allegations, then it will be an interesting case to follow as it proceeds along.
Systemic Losses and Fiduciary Liability
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We have all taken note of the run up in filings of very large breach of fiduciary duty cases against plan fiduciaries that are based on the tremendous losses incurred in investments held by plans as a result of the subprime lending mess. The filings themselves are noteworthy, and the numbers, losses and alleged misconduct depicted in them are eye-grabbing, in ways reminiscent of tabloid headlines that focus on the most sensational elements of a story for the purpose of separating readers from their three quarters. Most lawyers, myself included, and other observers have immediately delved into the ERISA defense lawyers playbook in thinking through these cases, looking towards the procedural, and if they fail, substantive defenses that the fiduciaries can present. But it may well be that the best defense is in the fact that fiduciary obligations may be high, but they do not require omniscience, and therefore in the argument that even a fiduciary who did everything at the level of competent industry professionals was still going to have the plan assets suffer these large losses, and thus cannot be liable here. I thought about this as I read this article here (the latest in what I have always thought of as Paul Krugman’s simplified economics seminars for the non-economists among us, including myself), which could almost serve as a trial lawyer’s closing argument that, whatever happened to the plan’s assets, it wasn’t the fiduciary’s fault, but a systemic problem giving rise to losses that could not have been avoided.
I am not entirely sure I believe that argument myself, at least in all cases, but in the case of a fiduciary who can document that standard, best investment practices were pursued, and the losses happened anyway, it’s a pretty persuasive argument. For the plaintiffs’ bar bringing these cases, and for the plan participants who have suffered large losses in their retirement holdings, what does this mean? It means that pragmatically, the case to be put in will probably have to combine the existence of the large systemic losses with compelling evidence that the fiduciaries in question in any particular case did not actually follow the industry’s best practices, but instead fell down on the job somewhere along the way, before those losses struck home. That second piece of the case is where the fun will be for the lawyers, in the nitty gritty of discovery battles seeking that evidence and in the fights to submit or exclude expert testimony as to whether the professionals did not pursue appropriate practices and whether that caused or increased the losses.
The First Circuit on ERISA Standing
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Very interesting case out of the First Circuit the other day on the question of whether former employees satisfy ERISA standing requirements with regard to defined contribution plans. Short answer is they do, but the Court’s analysis and discussion is an interesting open field run across a range of issues that are both explicit and implicit to any consideration of this question. One particular point, basically noted in a footnote, was of particular interest to me. I have discussed frequently in past posts my thesis that much of the evolution in ERISA law is and will continue to be driven by the economic effect on employees of the replacement of the pension system by 401(k) plans; this is partly because employees have become the persons at risk from investment mistakes, which they generally were not - barring complete failure of the employer and its pension plan - when employees were instead covered by pensions. In an interesting footnote, the Court addresses the distinction between the two types of benefits, and hints at the impact of that difference on employees:Under a defined benefit plan, participants are typically promised a fixed level of retirement income, computed on the basis of a formula contained in the plan documents. See 29 U.S.C. §1002(35). The formula generally accounts for an employee's years of service and compensation level at retirement. Graden, 496 F.3d at 297 n.10. In contrast with a defined contribution plan, where the amount of benefits is directly related to the investment income earned in an individual account, the investment performance of the portfolio held by a defined benefit plan has no effect on the level of benefits to which a participant is entitled, provided that the plan remains solvent. See LaRue,128 S. Ct. at 1025 ("Misconduct by the administrators of a defined benefit plan will not affect an individual's entitlement to a defined benefit unless it creates or enhances the risk of default by the entire plan.").
The case is Kerr et al. v. W.R. Grace, et al.
From Preemption to ERISA Standing, and Lots of Things In-Between
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Philadelphia, New York, court hearings - I have been everywhere the past week or so other than at my desk where I could put up blog posts. Here’s a run down of interesting things I came across along the way that you may want to read. First, for those of you who can’t get enough of this topic - I know I can’t, but then I am fascinated enough by this stuff to maintain an entire blog on the subject of ERISA - Workplace Prof passed along this student note on preemption and “pay or play” statutes: Leslie A. Harrelson, Recent Fourth Circuit Decisions: Retail Industry Leaders Ass'n v. Fielder: ERISA Preemption Trumps the "Play or Pay" Law, 67 Maryland L. Rev. 885 (2008). Second, SCOTUS passed along that the Supreme Court decided not to accept for hearing Amschwand v. Spherion Corp., which, I noted in a previous post, presented an opening for the Court to address when monetary awards for breaches of fiduciary duty can qualify as equitable relief that can be sought under ERISA. I have commented before that the Court has advanced the ball on equitable relief under ERISA into almost untenable terrain, and I am not sure whether the Court can bring any greater clarity to the issue without backtracking from its recent jurisprudence on the subject; given the unlikeliness of the Court doing so already with regard to such relatively recent decisions, it is probably just as well that the Court did not take on the issues presented by that case.
Third, you could learn everything you need to know about the standards of review for benefit denials and the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in MetLife v. Glenn by clicking on the “Standard of Review” topic over on the left hand side of this blog; or you could spend an hour listening to this webinar on the topic.
Fourth, Pension Risk Matters passes along this Sixth Circuit decision enforcing the Supreme Court’s approach to individual claimants in LaRue, finding that two participants could sue for breach of fiduciary duty. There are two particularly interesting side notes about this. First, it illustrates a particular point I - and others - made in a number of media outlets after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in LaRue, namely that, while it may not result in an avalanche of litigation that otherwise would not have been filed, the ruling is certainly going to lead to an increase in the filing of smaller cases on behalf of a few participants in circumstances that, in the past, would not have generated suits unless a class wide action could be brought. Second, the case presages what may be the dying off, by a thousand cuts, of the long held use of standing to cut off ERISA breach of fiduciary duty suits at the earliest stages of procedural wrangling, long before any litigation over the merits of a case, something which occurred at the federal district court level in the original LaRue case itself. Roy Harmon, over at his Health Plan Law blog, has a detailed analysis of this question, one I have been thinking about since LaRue was decided but which Roy has thankfully saved me from addressing in detail at this point.
A Brief List of Things Worth Reading
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Even when trying cases, I have never had a week so busy since launching the blog that I haven’t been able to find time to post. David Rossmiller likes to say that work is the curse of the blogging class, but even when really busy, I have always found writing up a blog post to be a nice chance to recharge my batteries. So for those of you looking for something ERISA related to read on this upcoming summer weekend, I thought I would at least pass along some of the more interesting things I have been reading this week. These include: Kevin LaCroix’s latest post summing up the status of all of the subprime related lawsuits filed around the country’s courthouses, including two new cases brought under ERISA alleging breach of fiduciary duty as a result of subprime related exposures; the Workplace Prof’s series of posts on, in order, the Supreme Court’s request for the government’s view on a cash balance plan issue, the Ninth Circuit’s view that a disability benefit plan claim can be denied if the claimant does not cooperate with investigation of the claim to the extent required by the plan’s terms, and on recent appellate authority on the effectiveness - or ineffectiveness - of particular approaches to delegating discretionary authority to administrators; and the Florida Appellate Blog’s post on an Eleventh Circuit decision finding that an administrator did not have to provide a copy of an IME report to a claimant prior to conclusion of the internal appeal procedure.
Two More ERISA Cases for the Supreme Court?
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The good folks who write the SCOTUS blog are engaged in one of their periodic attempts to read the tea leaves and predict what cases the Supreme Court will choose to hear. This time, they think the Court will review two ERISA cases, Geddes v. United Staffing - which concerns the standard of review to be applied to benefit determinations when fiduciary duties are delegated to a non-fiduciary - and Amschwand v. Spherion Corp., which presents an opportunity to clarify when monetary awards for breaches of fiduciary duty can qualify as equitable relief actionable under ERISA. If the Court hears both cases, we will see a continuation of the trend of the Court focusing on and likely reframing the course of ERISA litigation. Geddes provides not just an opportunity to understand the impact of delegation to third party administrators, and to open up for further development some of the unsettled issues in that realm, but also an opportunity, on the heels of whatever the Court decides in the currently pending MetLife v. Glenn case, to alter the settled understandings of when and how to apply the differing standards of review that apply in benefit cases. Amschwand, in turn, presents the Court with an opportunity to address a very technical and specific question, but one that continues to bedevil courts and litigants, namely the question of what types of claims for monetary recovery can proceed, under current Supreme Court jurisprudence, as claims for equitable relief under ERISA. Of note, the Solicitor General’s office, in recommending that the Court accept review of that case, seems to emphasize a need to broaden the range of theories that can be brought as equitable relief claims under ERISA so as to ensure an acceptable range of remedies and recourse to aggrieved plan participants, a proposition that many who favor broader remedies might not have expected to be forwarded by the administration’s legal team.
Follow the Numbers: the Evolution in ERISA Law
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I have noted two things - well, many things, only two of which are relevant to this post - in the past, one the line that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that everything is economics, and the second that we are beginning to see an incremental evolution in the law of ERISA to account for the reality that pensions - predominant at the time of many of the earlier, key court rulings on ERISA - have been supplanted by defined contribution plans. We saw the latter, for instance, in dramatic fashion in the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue, with the justices’ discussion of how rules applicable to pensions may not be equally applicable to 401(k) plans. The two ideas - that everything is at base driven by economic reality and the evolution of ERISA law - are linked, in a way driven home by this column in the Washington Post yesterday arguing for a new retirement structure based on the belief that the defined contribution approach simply is not going to work for most employees. The author noted “that when ERISA went on the books in 1974, employers were contributing 89 percent of the funds in pension plans, but by 2000, the employers' share of contributions had dropped to 49 percent.” With that change, as I have argued before, we are going to see a real shift in court rulings on ERISA as applied to defined contribution plans, with rulings providing more protection - or at least more recourse - to plan participants when the conduct of plan fiduciaries, particularly in the realm of investment choices, is challenged. When ERISA was only concerned with a world in which almost all retirement benefits were in the form of a pension, investment mistakes were, speaking generally and in sweepingly broad terms, the problem of the sponsor, as the employee was still promised his or her benefits; defined contribution plans invert this paradigm, making investment mistakes by fiduciaries the employees’ problem, and the law of ERISA will continue to shift to give those employees more redress than they have traditionally had in that situation under ERISA.
Millions for Defense, Billions for Damages: State Street's Exposure
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Backdating. It’s a scandal. No, not that backdating. I mean when bloggers can’t get to something when it first comes up, and then go back in time to talk about it. That’s what I mean by backdating, and that’s what I am going to do today. Last week, I read, but didn’t have a chance to discuss here, this article from Bloomberg on the State Street Bank subprime losses and potential ERISA related exposure. The article was particularly interesting because it takes a tack someone different than most articles that, like this one, rely on lawyers to evaluate the litigation against State Street arising out of those events; most such articles focus on liability issues, the procedural defenses available to State Street under ERISA, and the defensive position that the company can assert. This article, though, asks and attempts to answer the million dollar - or in this case, more like the billion dollar - question of how much losing these cases will cost State Street. The numbers bandied about by well informed lawyers are staggering, even to the jaded eye. The article rounds up the usual band of worthies to comment, including the Workplace Prof’s mild mannered alter ego, Paul Secunda, who tacks the eye popping number of “hundreds of millions to the billions” on State Street’s potential liability, and Boston ERISA lawyer Marcia Wagner, who noted that the plan administrators filing suit against State Street may have had no other options but to sue. To quote the article:
Wagner said fund managers hurt by the drop may have an obligation to sue as the existing plaintiffs have. “To the extent plans were misled into purchasing something they were not authorized to purchase, they may have a fiduciary obligation to sue,'' said the lawyer, who isn't representing the investment manager or plaintiffs. ``It's sue or be sued,'' she said. ``They allowed bad investments, so they should be attempting to make the plans whole.”
This echoes something I said in my last post on the State Street mess, in which I raised concerns about the fact that pension fund managers invested in the State Street products without properly understanding what they were buying. As I suggested in that post, administrators fall down on their own fiduciary obligations in such circumstances. As Wagner’s comment suggests, it may well be that the administrators’ fiduciary duties under those circumstances require them to then try to remedy their initial mistakes by suing to recover the losses, rather than compounding their own fiduciary breaches by simply absorbing the loss; that latter course of action would likely just make the administrators themselves targets for breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits based on their own mistakes in investing in the State Street funds.
Big Questions From A Small Story on a (Relatively) Small Loss
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Here’s a short newspaper story of a local municipal pension plan that suffered a $2.4 million loss to its pension fund, which is only about a $53 million fund, as a result of investments in subprime mortgage backed assets made either by State Street or in State Street funds (the article isn’t clear on the relationship between the pension plan and State Street, the current poster boy for breaching fiduciary duty by subprime investments). As the article points out, the pension plan has retained counsel to pursue State Street over the loss, on the theory that State Street did not adequately disclose the nature of the investments and the risk; this is pretty much par for the course for the various State Street subprime lawsuits being brought by pension and 401(k) plans, which essentially allege that volatile subprime related exposures were not disclosed but were instead contained within investment products sold as safe, conservative bond investments. Although dressed up to suit ERISA and breach of fiduciary duty issues, they can essentially be understand as highly gussied up bait and switch claims, in which retirement plan administrators and fiduciaries allege that they thought they were buying one thing from State Street - a conservative investment vehicle to balance out riskier investment allocations - but instead were sold something else, namely a highly volatile and risky exposure. State Street, of course, as the article reflects, views the cases otherwise, as instances in which the proper disclosure was made, but market downturns harmed the investments. This whole scenario raises an interesting question, aside from whether it is the plaintiff administrators or instead State Street that is right, because no matter which one is correct in their interpretation of the events at issue, you still end up in the same place, which is that the plans signing off on these investments just plain didn’t know what they were buying. This is certainly the case if, as the plaintiff fund fiduciaries claim, they weren’t told the truth, but it is likely also the case if, as State Street claims, plan sponsors were told the truth and are now simply complaining about market outcomes; if it’s the later case, one can only assume that the sponsors didn’t understand the risk being taken when they signed up for the investment.
And this goes right back to the most important question of all here, which is what were the plan sponsors and fiduciaries doing when they were offering these investment options or making these investments themselves? This scenario speaks of poor investigation and over reliance on the investment provider, namely State Street, and suggests the plans themselves did not have proper processes, including independent administrators with the sophistication to analyze the investment choices and risks, in place for choosing investment options, prior to offering them to plan participants or investing the plans' funds directly. In this day and age, I think we are moving past the point of debating whether those types of processes are part of the fiduciary obligations of those running retirement plans.
And by the way, for the record, I am not buying the article’s spin that the loss was not that damaging to the pension plan discussed in the article, because it was only about $2.4 million. Against total plan assets of approximately $53 million, and with the taxpayers on the hook to fund the pensions because it is a municipal plan, that’s an important hit, both financially and to the public pocketbook.
Excessive Fee Litigation: A Real Problem or An Imaginary One?
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Here's a piece passed along by the Workplace Prof, noting the rise in excessive fee litigation under ERISA. I have noted before that the combination of demographic and economic factors with the ruling in LaRue is going to create more of these types of actions over the years, not less, and thus I share the skepticism the Prof expresses over whether, as a defense lawyer quoted in the piece suggests, these cases don't pose a significant problem for plan administrators. Moreover, I don't necessarily buy the sentiment suggested by defense counsel quoted in the article, to the effect that these cases are about a battle of the experts over whether any particular plan's fees were too high relative to the market or not. I think of them more as due diligence and best practices cases, as really revolving around whether the administrator followed a proper process to pick providers and funds, and to make sure the fees involved remained appropriate as measured against appropriate benchmarks.
Pension Estimates: Not Worth The Computer They Are Printed On
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Here’s an interesting decision out of the First Circuit yesterday, concerning errors in providing estimates of pension amounts to participants and whether a participant can hold the sponsor to the erroneous estimate, rather than receive only the correct amount under the actual terms of the retirement plan in question. Short answer? A participant only gets what the plan, by its express terms, grants, and not the larger erroneously estimated amount. Although it is fair to say that the actual outcome of any such dispute will depend on the actual facts of a given circumstance and the particular theories under which a particular participant elects to proceed, this case reflects that enforcing the estimate, rather than simply receiving the lower actual amount due under the plan, is an uphill battle, at best. In this particular case, Livick v Gillette, the employee struck out both on attempts to obtain the higher amount by arguing that the erroneous estimate was an actionable breach of fiduciary duty, and on an estoppel theory. The court’s analysis of the estoppel theory is particularly noteworthy, as it provides great fodder for any sponsor or fiduciary defending against an estoppel claim related to an ERISA governed plan. If you are litigating a case in the First Circuit concerning an estoppel claim related to the benefits available under a particular ERISA governed plan, this case would be the place to start.
Does Employer Stock Even Belong In Retirement Plans?
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Should there even be employer securities in a 401(k) plan or other retirement vehicle? That’s the million dollar question (or more like the hundred million dollar question) that cases like those arising out of the Bear Stearns collapse raise. Moreover, it goes right to the underlying tension between ERISA and the securities laws that plays out in the concept of fiduciary duty: namely, the extent to which it is appropriate for a fiduciary to continue to allow employer stock holdings in a retirement vehicle when the company is simultaneously facing market pressure on its stock price and an obligation to comply with the securities laws in dealing with the marketplace as a whole. The legal and philosophical issues of this inquiry go on and on, spinning on like a fall into the rabbit hole; this is manifest in cases such as the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Baxter, discussed here, in which these types of issues are merely raised, but not resolved. It’s a good topic for a law review article, but since blog posts traditionally don’t run to the hundreds of pages, I am not going to get very far into answering those issues here, but rather want only to raise the topic, which I think will be played out in a fundamental manner in the case law as the subprime mess lurches its way through the legal system. And on a practical level, what raised this thought this morning was this story here in the New York Times about pension funds moving out of equities, because, while there is a certain apples and oranges aspect to any comparison between that issue and employee holdings of employer stock in defined contribution plans (in that pension funds are moving in this direction because of future liabilities related to pension plan payouts and not necessarily for the same reasons that an employee might not want to be invested in his or her own employer’s equities), that fact does raise an interesting question. Simply put, if the professionals who run pension funds are moving out of the stock market for, in part, volatility reasons, should comparatively unsophisticated 401(k) investors be allowed to, even in some instances encouraged to, overload with one particular company’s equities?
Passing Along Some Reading on Excessive Fee Cases and Other Timely ERISA Topics
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What would this blog be if it was done as a newsletter instead? Well, probably something like this new ERISA newsletter out of Proskauer Rose, with its detailed but readable length discussions of current events in the field, such as the Supreme Court’s recent decision in LaRue and the Supreme Court’s consideration of whether to hear a case that will allow it to return again to the problem of defining the available scope of equitable relief under ERISA. For me personally, I particularly liked the discussion of the latest trends at the trial level in the federal court system with regard to lawsuits filed over allegedly excessive fees charged on mutual fund investment options, as it takes an approach that I like to pursue whenever possible in my own posts here on this blog: it discusses the early decisions on the issue at the motions stage in the trial courts, and looks ahead to what this may mean for the industry as a whole and service providers. Its worth a read, and if you enjoy this blog, you will almost certainly enjoy this newsletter as well.
What Happens When ERISA and the Law of Insurance Coverage Collide?
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Wow, I guess this is really Seventh Circuit week here, with, I guess, a particular focus on the jurisprudence of Judge Easterbrook, whose opinion in Baxter I discussed in my last post. This time, I turn to his decision from Wednesday in Federal Insurance Co. v. Arthur Andersen, which strikes right at the intersection of the two subject areas in the title of this blog, insurance and ERISA. The Arthur Andersen opinion concerns the extent of coverage, if any, for Arthur Andersen’s massive settlement of lawsuits related to its retirement liabilities upon its well publicized, post-Enron collapse, under a policy covering breaches of fiduciary duty. The court found that there was no coverage, for a number of reasons, the most salient of which being that, first, the losses in question were the actual pension amounts, which the policy does not cover (it instead covers only other losses related to a pension plan, separate from the actual amount of the pension benefits in question), and second, that although the claims in question related to pension plans, they were not actually for breaches of fiduciary duty related to such plans, which is all that the policy actually responds to. There are some interesting lessons for plan sponsors and plan administrators in these findings: first, that it is important to remember that, in buying fiduciary liability coverage, this is not the same thing as insuring the benefits owed to pensioners themselves, and, second, that the exact scope of the coverage is narrow and limited by its exact terms, which may not extend coverage to the specific allegations of any particular lawsuit arising from the pension plan. What’s the take away? A close look by an expert is needed when selecting insurance coverage for pension plans and the people who run them, if for no other reason than to have an accurate understanding of the extent to which potential problems with the plans may actually be covered. Beyond these lessons in the case for people on the ERISA side of this blog’s title, the decision provides a fascinating run through a number of complicated insurance coverage topics for those of you who are interested in the insurance coverage half of this blog’s title. The judge - or perhaps his clerk, I don’t know the practices in that particular court - writes fluidly on the law of estoppel, waiver, the duty to defend, and the respective rights of the insurer and the insured when it comes to control of the defense and settlement of a covered lawsuit.
What LaRue Wrought
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Suzanne Wynn has the story of the day when it comes to ERISA litigation, as she posts on the Seventh Circuit’s application of LaRue to exactly the type of case that, had the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, would have gone away without any potential liability on the part of the fiduciaries or, for that matter, recovery by the plan participant. The case, as Suzanne explains, concerns a single plan participant who charges plan fiduciaries with breaches of fiduciary duty related to the amount of company stock held in that particular participant’s account; the plaintiff’s theory holds that the fiduciaries breached their duties because they “allowed participants to invest in [company] stock despite knowing that the stock was overpriced and therefore was a ‘bad deal’.” The Seventh Circuit recognized that, after LaRue, a plan participant can move forward with such a claim, at least in terms of having standing to pursue relief that is not plan wide. The Seventh Circuit’s decision touches on a number of themes that are not fully addressed in the opinion, but which really rest at the crossroads that the law of ERISA finds itself at today. The first has to do with the extent to which LaRue will or will not increase litigation. I have previously discussed that, in my view, the real impact of LaRue is that the types of cases, such as stock drop cases of the kind considered by the Seventh Circuit in this case, that in the past would only be brought if the scale was sufficient to attract the interest of the organized plaintiffs’ class action bar, will now be brought in many instances even if the scale is insufficient to give rise to class or plan wide litigation. Rather, as this case illustrates perfectly, these types of theories will be pressed now if even only one participant has enough loss to warrant the action, as LaRue expressly authorizes and as occurred in this case. This is where you will see the impact of LaRue with regard to expanding litigation, not necessarily in terms of a massive increase in numbers of suits, but rather in an incremental increase in the types and natures of suits brought against fiduciaries. And don’t kid yourself - as the baby boomer generation moves towards retirement, there are going to be a huge number of plan participants in 401(k) and ESOP plans and the like who have large enough accounts and holdings (for instance of company stock) for it to be worth their while to bring these types of suits if their accounts take a significant hit.
The second that I wanted to mention relates to something that is certainly not going to be news to any long time reader of this blog, and its certainly not an idea unique to me, namely, the fact that, in the aftermath of judicial and political responses to the growth - and some would say overuse - of class action securities litigation, the plaintiffs’ bar has begun using ERISA to prosecute what are in essence securities fraud claims of the kind that, in the past, would have been simply litigated under the securities laws. The plaintiffs’ bar has found that, given the evolution of the securities laws and of ERISA, ERISA may well be the better theory to prosecute in stock drop type cases. The swarm of litigation already being filed over the collapse of the Bear Stearns stock is a perfect example of the type of event that we have long been conditioned to expect to be litigated under the securities laws, but which is instead generating putative class actions under ERISA related to the company’s ESOP and other retirement vehicles. Among the many issues that this evolution in securities related litigation raises is how to integrate the securities laws and ERISA under these types of scenarios, to prevent ERISA from being distorted from its original purpose and transformed instead into simply some type of alternative securities law regime; Judge Easterbrook, writing for the Seventh Circuit, raises exactly these points, but doesn’t resolve them, noting instead that they will have to be developed in the future.
The case is Rogers v. Baxter International, and thanks to Suzanne for bringing it to my attention.
The Meaning of Justice Roberts' Concurrence in LaRue
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There’s nothing really new in this piece for those who have already closely followed and studied the LaRue decision (how’s that for opening with a bang?), but this column on the decision in the April 2008 issue of Metropolitan Corporate Counsel magazine by two Proskauer attorneys is interesting. They focus on playing out the meaning of Justice Roberts’ concurrence concerning whether such claims need to be pursued as denial of benefits claims, rather than as breach of fiduciary duty claims, and just what that means practically if the lower courts take him up on that suggestion.
Back to the Well: Fiduciaries and Subprime Assets
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I guess this is the flip side of all the grief that is starting to come down on fiduciaries for excessive - or at least what seems to plaintiffs’ lawyers to be excessive in hindsight - exposure to the subprime mortgage mess in pension and 401(k) holdings: pension plan fiduciaries now adding such exposure to their funds in the hope of goosing returns by buying these beaten down assets at fire sale prices (kind of like they are playing at being Jamie Dimon). Here’s the story, and thanks to my colleague Eric Brodie for bringing this development to my attention.
Back From Trial, But the World Kept Spinning In the Interim
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My trial finally concluded late yesterday after two weeks, with the jury returning a verdict in favor of my client (pause here for self-congratulatory pat on the back). While I was able to get some posts up last week, during the first week of trial, events during trial this past week left me with no time to post. A lot went on during that week that would be of interest to readers of this blog, running from the almost certain ERISA litigation that will follow from the Bear Stearns collapse, to further Department of Labor attempts to mandate transparency, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ continuing efforts to single handedly prove that state regulation of employer provided health insurance benefits should, in fact, be preempted. We’ll return to these themes, and other topics, next week, now that we have time to get the printing press rolling again here.
Want to Learn More About the Post-LaRue World?
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I am trying to kick the LaRue habit, but couldn’t resist going back to the well one more time (how’s that for mixing my metaphors?). I know from readers of this blog and from talking to other lawyers that people are very interested in LaRue and the Supreme Court’s current interest in ERISA cases - in fact, one lawyer told me that right after LaRue was decided he was at a meeting on an entirely different topic but LaRue is all anyone wanted to talk about that day- so I wanted to pass along this very interesting looking teleconference next month on individual 401(k) suits post-LaRue. The faculty includes Tom Gies, who represented the plan and its sponsor in LaRue, and Karen L. Handorf, an attorney currently in private practice who previously worked for the Office of the Solicitor of Labor, background that may make her ideally suited to comment on one of the biggest mysteries of all raised by LaRue and the Supreme Court’s selection for its docket of two more ERISA cases, namely what’s with the Supreme Court’s sudden fascination with ERISA litigation.
More on LaRue: Lawyers USA Weighs In
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Thought I would pass this along right now, while the article is still available to non-subscribers - I suspect if you read this post tomorrow, you will have to subscribe to get access to the article by then. Either way, here’s an interesting article available on Lawyers USA today on the LaRue decision, and on the broader topic of what impact it will have. I am quoted in it on the issue of whether it will spawn more litigation; to quote the article:Some see the ruling as spawning multiple lawsuits by individual 401(k) account holders.
"It will open the door to a lot more litigation. I don't think it will be an avalanche, but plan sponsors are definitely looking at death by a thousand cuts," said Stephen Rosenberg, an attorney with The McCormack Firm in Boston, who blogs on ERISA issues.
This is pretty consistent with what I said in my post last Friday, in which I discussed my views about how much litigation will result from this case. It is hard, as I said then, to quantify, but it is clear that the case paves the way for sponsors to face a steady stream of smaller cases, whereas in the past they really - or at least predominately - only had to worry about whether they were in a position to be targeted for a large dollar value, class wide type suit.
Fiduciary Obligations - and Common Sense - Support Hiring Outside Expertise for 401(k) Plans
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One of the common themes of many of my posts, as well as of many of the judicial opinions, concerning fiduciary obligations of companies sponsoring 401(k) plans is the need to bring in outside expertise to manage the plans, particularly for the purpose of insuring that investment selections are appropriate and priced right. As I have discussed both in numerous posts and in a range of articles in which I have been quoted, smaller and mid-sized companies generally lack the expertise to properly handle all of the aspects of 401(k) plans and can best discharge their fiduciary duties - and best protect themselves against litigation - by retaining outside experts to manage a plan. There is an entire industry that exists to service such companies and their plans. Here is a story out of New Hampshire that illustrates this point brilliantly; it concerns a small company that believed it could operate its own 401(k) plan without an outside vendor, and ended up, without any intention to defraud, being pursued by the Department of Labor for $33,000 in employee contributions that were never paid into the plan. By all accounts, the company was not engaged in anything underhanded; it just was wrong in thinking it could handle the logistics itself. And not to beat the LaRue drum too much, but obviously the establishment in that case of the right of plan participants to sue fiduciaries for mistakes affecting their 401(k) accounts (whatever may be the exact parameters of that right, an issue up for some debate in light of some of the vagaries of the three opinions from the Supreme Court), just drives home the importance of making sure that a 401(k) plan is run absolutely as well as possible.
A Couple of Other Perspectives on LaRue
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There’s a lot out there on the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue, and I thought I would pass along today a couple of articles and blog posts that approach the issues raised by the case from a slightly different perspective than simply the technical legal issues raised by the case. Employee benefits lawyer George Chimento discusses the LaRue decision in this client advisory here, with a focus on a particular question, namely, whether in light of the problems posed by LaRue type cases, it makes any sense to sponsor a 401(K) plan that allows participants to pick and choose among investments. He makes a compelling argument that it just may not make any sense to do this, given the liability risks, amply illustrated by the LaRue case, and the investment skills of the average participant. He sums that issue up in this paragraph from his article:With all this additional liability, is it wise to sponsor self-directed plans, with the extra expenses associated with open-end mutual funds and daily investment switching? Are participants really better off self-managing their retirement assets, doing something they were not educated to do? Perhaps it's safer, and better for all parties, just to have an "old fashioned" managed fund, without participant direction, and to employ properly certified investment managers who can be delegated fiduciary liability under ERISA. A dividend of LaRue is that it may cause employers to step back and reconsider the current, expensive, and dangerous fad of self-direction.
And Kevin LaCroix, a lawyer/expert insurance intermediary, tackles LaRue in this interesting blog post on his well-regarded D&O Diary blog, in which he focuses on the issues for fiduciary liability insurance raised by the case. One interesting point he makes is that the availability of coverage may be affected by exactly that split between the Justice Roberts’ concurrence and the other two opinions, related to whether or not claims of this nature should actually be prosecuted only as denial of benefits claims, or instead as breach of fiduciary duty claims. Anyone interested in the insurance implications of LaRue should find it a useful and informative post.
Interpreting LaRue
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Some follow up thoughts on the Supreme Court’s opinion in LaRue, after having some time to digest it. First, the court’s three opinions make for an interesting assortment of analyses of the issue, but what is most important on the front lines, down at the trial level where these issues play out in court, is the unanimous agreement that an individual 401(k) participant can sue for losses to just his or her account. This resolves a key dispute that, I know from my own practice, has become a key issue in the question of when and how participants can seek legal redress with regard to their 401(k) accounts. Second, the three opinions set forth almost radically different answers to the question of how and why such an individual participant can sue for losses just to his or her account in a 401(k) plan. The majority opinion posits that this is the appropriate reading of ERISA in the context of defined contribution plans, which may be different from what the rule should be with regard to defined benefit plans. The second opinion, by Justice Roberts, poses the extremely thorny argument that, while a plan participant can sue for such losses, he or she should do so under the denial of benefits portion of ERISA, rather than under the breach of fiduciary duty portion of ERISA. The third opinion, by Justice Thomas, finds that the plain language of the statute warrants individual participants being allowed to bring such claims, and holds no truck with the idea, relied on by the majority, that there is some underlying principle distinct to defined contribution plans that either justifies - or is necessary to justify - this conclusion.
The competing opinions present some interesting issues. First off, Justice Roberts’ suggestion that the law governing denied benefits, rather than the law of breach of fiduciary duty, should apply to the circumstances of the LaRue case appears unworkable in the context of that particular type of claim, for a variety of practical and legal reasons; there is a certain extent to which it seems to me that even suggesting that is to work mischief, particularly for the judges and litigants who, going forward, are going to have to work out the myriad issues that claims like that brought by the participant in LaRue raise, none of which were preemptively resolved by the Supreme Court. Second, there is something telling in the contrast between Justice Thomas’ approach and that of the majority, something that may well be a clash of philosophy, not just with regard to statutory construction for purposes of the instant case, but also perhaps as well with regard to the road that lays ahead for the law of ERISA. Justice Thomas is correct in his opinion that the issue can be resolved, in the participant’s favor, simply off of the plain language of the statute, without relying on any special considerations raised by the fact that the case involves a defined contribution account rather than a defined benefit plan, which is the issue animating the majority’s opinion. Does the majority’s heavy emphasis on the fact that LaRue concerned a defined contribution plan hint at a belief among the majority that, in fact, ERISA needs to be treated as an organic, evolving body of law that needs to shift from its past precedents to account for the rise of defined contribution plans? And if so, is the emphasis on this point in the majority’s opinion a subtle suggestion to lower courts to approach new issues brought before them concerning defined contribution plans - or even old issues never before resolved under defined contribution plans - with an eye to how ERISA should develop to fit those types of plans? At a minimum, it is hard not to see lawyers for participants arguing exactly that to district courts and circuit courts of appeal in the aftermath of the ruling in LaRue.
The Supreme Court Decides LaRue, In Probably Predictable Fashion
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As a practicing litigator, I often can’t delve too deeply into a particular issue right when it arises, and instead have to return to it that night to analyze it for further discussion the next day. With a trial set to start in one of my cases and a court appearance this afternoon, this is one of those instances, but I did want to pass along the Supreme Court’s opinion in LaRue, just issued today. I will give it a more in-depth read tonight and may post more on it tomorrow, but in the interim, here is the opinion itself, along with two initial, superficial thoughts. First, as I - and others - expected, the opinion goes in favor of the plan participant, and expands the right of individual plan participants to sue for breach of fiduciary duties. Second, on first glance, the opinion seems animated by the need to account for the particular risks of defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s, and to recognize the need for the law of ERISA to develop in a manner that accounts for the transition to those types of benefit plans. In a weird bit of precognition, that’s something I just talked about in my post earlier this morning, on the Supreme Court accepting cert on still another ERISA case.
I Want My (Pension Tension Blues) MTV
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For better or worse, I’m old enough to remember where I was when MTV debuted, back when it actually played music videos. I am sure there is something to be said about the fact that a quarter century later, I now watch music videos about fiduciary risks concerning pensions, but I am not sure exactly what. You should watch it too, right here.
The Benefits of Relying On Investment Managers
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We all know that in reality, most companies that sponsor retirement plans, including 401(k)s, for their employees bring in outside advisors to manage the plan. There are at least two primary reasons for this, the first being that most companies don’t have the expertise to select investments and otherwise run plans themselves, and hope to get better retirement plan performance by relying on outside expertise. The second is the hope that fiduciary exposures will be reduced by bringing in, and relying upon, an outside advisor who has superior expertise with regard to retirement investing. These two factors ideally work in conjunction to improve retirement accounts for plan participants; the fear of legal liability inspires a desire to bring in experts, who in turn can do a better job in selecting investments than the company could on its own. In this way, we see the operation of a perfectly selected legal rule, and we see the important role that fiduciary liability rules play in the ERISA scheme; the exposure does not simply exist to support litigation after the fact, but also as a motivating force that improves plan performance on a day in, day out basis, by driving plan sponsors towards reliance on expertise that will both protect them and improve performance. It is possible, to some extent, to view almost all breach of fiduciary duty litigation as examples of failures in this dynamic. For instance, what are claims that companies breached their fiduciary obligations by excessively including company stock in a plan but instances in which a company, insufficiently afraid of its potential liability for breach of fiduciary duties, failed to either diversify investments on its own or bring in sufficient outside expertise to allow it to do so? A good example of this dynamic at work can be seen in Judge Young’s just released ruling out of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Bunch v. W.R. Grace, in which the court found that the company was insulated from breach of fiduciary duty claims with regard to the retention and sale of company stock in one of its retirement funds by the company’s retention of and reliance on an outside investment manager to make those decisions. The court found that the investment manager had properly acquitted itself with regard to those issues, and therefore the company could not be liable on claims that it had breached its fiduciary duties by selecting and relying upon that advisor. The court explained that If the investment manager “did not commit a breach, then [the company] did not fail in the discharge of its duty to select and monitor” the manager.
But you can take that analysis one step further. The interesting aspect in this regard of the ruling in Bunch is that the company was absolved of liability by its reliance on an outside expert because the outside expert did not itself breach any fiduciary obligations by the actions it took and decisions it made in that role. But what if the advisor had violated fiduciary obligations in its handling of its delegated duties? What then of the company’s attempt to protect itself by retaining and relying upon an outside expert? The answer in general is that the company can probably still successfully defend itself against claims for breach of fiduciary duty, so long as it can show that its own steps in selecting and monitoring the outside advisor were prudent, even if the chosen advisor turned out, in hindsight, to be the wrong choice of advisor or investment manager. And in that lies the two real teachings of Bunch. First, that companies can protect themselves from fiduciary liability by selecting and delegating to an outside expert and, second, companies have to pursue that old cliche - best practices - in making that delegation if they really want to avail themselves of the protection that bringing in outside expertise can provide. By abiding by the second teaching, they should be protected even if the advisor they selected thereafter, unlike the advisors relied upon by W.R. Grace in the Bunch case, falls down on the job.
LaRue is Decided . . . Well, Sort of
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In an opinion it issued on Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit confronted essentially the exact same facts and issues as are at play in the LaRue case currently pending before the Supreme Court, and effectively entered its own prediction as to how the Supreme Court will rule in LaRue. Tackling the same arguments that were presented to the Supreme Court in LaRue, the Sixth Circuit concluded that individual participants could recover on their own behalf for losses solely to their accounts in the plan, and that breach of fiduciary duty claims under ERISA are not limited to actions brought on behalf of the plan as a whole or for recovery benefiting the entire class of plan participants as a whole. This, of course, is the primary issue presented to the Supreme Court by the LaRue case. Interestingly, the Sixth Circuit even borrowed and relied upon Justice Breyer’s diamond hypothetical that he posed to the plan's counsel in LaRue in reaching its ruling in favor of the participants, a hypothetical that clearly caught many lawyers’ fancy after it was offered up by the justice during oral argument.
The decision is Tullis v. UMB Bank, N.A.
The Governance of Retirement Plans in the Aftermath of the Subprime Meltdown
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Fellow blogger Susan Mangiero and I are quoted extensively in a very interesting article, available here, in the January issue of the Institutional Real Estate Letter. The article, titled Investing in Good Governance, focuses on one of - if not the only - potential silver linings in the whole subprime mortgage mess, namely the possibility that it will help to focus pension plan fiduciaries on the fiduciary obligations, particularly as related to protecting plan assets from ill advised and ill informed investments, that they owe to the plan itself and to plan participants.
Researching Pension Related Litigation
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Dying is easy, comedy is hard? No, ERISA is hard. I tell people all the time that there is almost no such thing as a simple answer to an ERISA related question, or at least no such thing as a straightforward answer. There are entire chapters in ERISA treatises dedicated to the seemingly, but actually not, question of the proper manner in which to request plan documents so as to invoke the statutory obligations, upon financial penalty, imposed on administrators to produce them. Or take the question of equitable relief in a cause of action brought under ERISA; in almost every other area of the law, we all know what equitable relief is, but in ERISA, we have to engage in a historical inquiry into the development of the law of remedies to know if a particular claim is equitable or not. Now when you add in on top the fact that ERISA and its imposition of fiduciary obligations is beginning to supplant securities litigation theories as a method for suing corporations and investment banks for subprime, stock drop and other investment losses, as discussed here for instance, you can see just how complicated the topic becomes, as well as how potentially dangerous for fiduciaries and plan sponsors are the issues raised by ERISA. And of course, that’s what makes practicing in this area fun for those of us who handle these types of cases. But it also makes thorough and timely analysis of litigation risks and exposures crucially important, and what looks to be a promising new internet based research tool to help with this is now available. Pension Litigation Data is now up and running on line, and is meant to be a tool that will allow up to the minute research into the numerous pension related lawsuits pending in United States courts. The subscriber based site “debuts with over 1,500 retirement plan legal actions, each classified by nearly 100 fields, including court circuit, type of allegation, plaintiff, defendant and date [and provides a] continuously updated and searchable database” on the subject. A joint venture of a couple of companies, including fellow blogger Susan Mangiero of Pension Governance LLC, I think it looks promising, and you may want to take a look.
SmartMoney on the Practicalities of Complying With ERISA
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This is a law oriented blog, obviously, and one of the things that is always worth remembering is that the complicated legal issues played out in the cases discussed here have real world implications for plan participants and for businesses trying to provide benefits to their employees. A nice reminder of that is here, in this article on SmartMoney.com, in which I and others are quoted on the question of how business owners should operate 401(k) plans in light of the potential for fiduciary liability being imposed under ERISA.
On Regulation of Fiduciaries and Pension Plan Vendors
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I was interviewed by a reporter recently concerning the subprime mess and its implications for pension plan fiduciaries, and the issue came up as to whether further regulation was the answer, as she had heard from a number of others. To me, the ongoing problem we are seeing with fiduciary breaches - or at least allegations of them - arising from plan investments involve one type of flawed plan investment being replaced by another; first it was too much company stock in the plan, then when that problem worked its way out of the system, it was excessive fees being paid for investment options, with that quickly followed by the latest flaw du jour in investment selection, namely excessive exposure to subprime risk. Regulation can’t predict and thereby prevent whatever may turn out to be the next problematic interaction between the investment community and the obligations of pension plan fiduciaries to act prudently in selecting investments. Rather, regulation will inevitably target the last problem that popped up, not the next one that is coming down the pike. At best, one could improve things at the margins through further regulation by targeting not the fiduciaries themselves, but the vendors who provide investment products to them, and even then only by imposing more transparency, which may at least give pension fiduciaries a fighting chance at understanding the investments they are selecting and the risks or flaws inherent in them. This news yesterday out of the Department of Labor, that it is proposing a regulation requiring further disclosure to plans by vendors of their compensation, fits this to a tee. The proposed regulation will require that “all compensation, direct and indirect, to be received by the service provider be disclosed in writing.” Well, excessive fees charged by mutual fund companies and others for the investments held by pension plans and 401(k) plans is last year’s litigation problem for fiduciaries, and the world has already moved on to the next problem. Indeed, I would speculate that many fiduciaries have already accepted the need to engage in due diligence as to all aspects of their vendors’ compensation arrangements, both hidden and not, simply out of awareness of the past lawsuits that focused on the issue. It’s a perfect example that regulation can’t predict and protect fiduciaries and the plans they serve from the next particular investment problem, but can instead only identify and prevent a reoccurrence of a past investment problem for retirement plans. At the same time, though, the regulation is focused on the transparency problem, and on obliging vendors to provide information openly to fiduciaries and plans; that’s the best avenue for using regulation to aid fiduciaries pro-actively, by adding to the information they have access to in evaluating vendors and proposed investment choices.
Talkin' With Tom Gies, Counsel for the Respondents in LaRue
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I promised awhile back that I would run more interviews at some point on this blog, and we return today to our - granted, somewhat sporadic - series of interviews with movers and shakers in the worlds of ERISA and insurance. What provoked me to get back into the interviewing business, which I noted before are among the most difficult of posts to do well? The chance to provide more insight on the oral argument before the Supreme Court in LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg, which was argued right after the Thanksgiving weekend. And with that lead in, here’s the blog’s interview with Tom Gies, a partner at Crowell & Moring in Washington, D.C., who was lead counsel for the respondents. Tom was gracious enough to provide some real thought provoking commentary on both the issues raised by the case and some aspects of the argument before the court:
Blog: How did you end up representing the respondents?
Tom Gies: We have represented the employer, and the plan, in a variety of employment, benefits, corporate and commercial litigation matters for years. They are longstanding valued clients of our firm. When this case was initially filed in the district court in South Carolina, we were retained to defend against the claim.
Blog: Many ERISA cases, particularly in the area of pensions and 401(k)s, never reach the merits, and instead are resolved by procedural motions addressed to whether there is even a cause of action or remedy available to the plaintiff. That’s what happened here. Would the law of ERISA be better developed, or the parties themselves better served, if courts were resolving questions such as those presented by LaRue after development of the facts of a particular case? On the merits, as it were, rather than on procedural issues?
Tom Gies: An interesting question. The case was pled and litigated in the district court solely as a Section 502(a)(3) claim. We moved for judgment on the pleadings because it was pretty obvious plaintiff sought compensatory damages that are not available under Section 502(a)(3), following the Supreme Court's "rather emphatic guidance" in Mertens, Great-West and Sereboff. Every court that has looked at this question so far agrees with us on this point. And, not to get too much into the prediction game, I think it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will use this case to reverse field on the question of what's appropriate equitable relief under Section 502(a)(3). Had plaintiff pled the 502(a)(2) claim in the district court, the litigation may well have proceeded differently. For instance, there may have been a more fully developed record after discovery, so that the case could be resolved on a motion for summary judgment. The Fourth Circuit was correct in observing that the 502(a)(2) claim was waived, having not been litigated in the district court. As with other types of litigation, the parties to ERISA actions are better served when the basic rules of engagement are followed and parties are not permitted to raise new issues for the first time on appeal. In our judgment, a more complete record in this case would have made it even easier for a reviewing court to understand that this is not a good vehicle for expanding the scope of Section 502(a)(2). A court looking at this fact pattern in response to a motion for summary judgment would readily conclude that this case does not present a triable claim for “losses to the plan” resulting from a fiduciary breach. More generally, I don’t think it’s wise to have some sort of special, more lenient, pleading rules in ERISA cases. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Twombly recognizes the negative consequences, both to parties and the civil justice system, of the substantial costs imposed on defendants in having to go through discovery in complex litigation involving putative class claims. Those litigation costs are obvious in the 401k plan “stock drop” cases. The excessive fee claims present the same kinds of costs for employers and plan sponsors. The Court’s decision in Twombly wisely recognizes that bare allegations of a statutory violation, without more, should not subject a defendant to the tremendous cost of full-bore class action litigation. It shouldn’t make any difference whether such claims are brought by antitrust plaintiffs, Title VII claimants, or by lawyers representing ERISA participants.
Blog: Any particularly surprising questions or lines of inquiry at the oral argument directed at either you or LaRue’s counsel? What’s particularly interesting or surprising about it?
Tom Gies: Although the questioning of Mr. Stris regarding Section 502(a)(1)(B) was not a surprise (we mentioned it in our brief, and one of our amici devoted considerable time to the issue), I was intrigued with the implications in some of the questions asked by three of the Justices about the potential interplay between 502(a)(1)(B) and 502(a)(2). These questions suggest the Court will provide a careful analysis of the inter-relations of the various subdivisions of Section 502. The Court’s subsequent denial of certiorari in Eichorn v. AT&T may be another indication of the Court’s approach to this corner of ERISA law.
Blog: Any answers you’d like to have back? Any questions you’d like another shot at?
Tom Gies: I would have liked the opportunity to engage Justice Breyer more fully, perhaps in response to his second diamond theft hypothetical, on his question of "why" 502(a)(2) should not be read to extend to a situation like this. A decision to expand the remedies available under Section 502 has significant consequences because it is contrary to ERISA’s goal of encouraging plan formation. Permitting such lawsuits would inevitably require someone to make judgments as to a variety of issues, including: should there be a limit on damages, whether there should be jury trials for such claims, whether there should be an obligation on the part of the plaintiff to do some due diligence before bringing a damages action years after the alleged mistake, whether employers and plan sponsors can require arbitration of these kinds of claims, what should be done about the consequences of such litigation to the fiduciary insurance industry, and how would such claims be fit into the current rules for certification of class actions under Rule 23. There are surely others. These kinds of policy judgments seem best left to Congress.
Blog: Play it out for us. What’s the negatives for the industry if the Court reverses the Fourth Circuit and allows these types of claims to go forward?
Tom Gies: Imagine you have a new employee who joins your law firm, which, we assume, sponsors a 401k plan. Four years after you hire her, you get a lawsuit seeking compensatory damages for a violation of ERISA’s fiduciary duty rules. Her lawyer claims she was not given enrollment forms when she was hired, because of a mistake made by your HR director, and, as a result, employee contributions into the 401k plan were not made. The complaint goes on to assert that, had the contributions been made, she would have invested in Google the day after its IPO, and that the plan fiduciaries are personally liable for more than $500,000 in lost profits. When you look into it, your HR manager has a vague recollection that the employee took the paperwork and said she’d “think about” whether she wanted to join the plan. Should that case go to trial? Before a jury? Justice Scalia’s comment during oral argument in LaRue seemed to appreciate our point – there would be no end to the type of damages claims that plan participants could devise if these types of claims are permitted to go forward.
Imagine another situation. One of your employees who participates in your 401k plan had 75% of her account balance invested in mutual funds heavily concentrated in real estate. Now that those investments have lost considerable value, she seeks counsel. You get a complaint for compensatory damages that includes the allegation that someone in HR told the employee to “stay with” the real estate investments because that sector of the market would be sure to turn around soon.
The considerable costs of defending against such lawsuits will be born ultimately by employer plan sponsors. Fiduciary insurance will become even more expensive. Permitting these kinds of claims would undercut one of the fundamental assumptions made by employers in deciding to offer DC plans, rather than DB plans – the ability to shift investment risk to employees. All in all, a bad idea if you believe, as we do, that it’s critical not to take steps that would discourage employers, particularly small employers, from continuing to offer DC plan.
Blog: Paul Secunda, at the Workplace Prof blog, and I have been going around and around for a bit about whether ERISA is properly understood as having been intentionally enacted by Congress with only limited rights of recovery and remedy for plan participants. Clearly, that idea underlies DeWolff’s arguments to a substantial degree and, in fact, the lower courts’ rejection of LaRue’s claims can be understood as a recognition of this principle and of the fact that, as a result, LaRue simply has no recourse at this point. What’s your view on this? Are those of us who treat ERISA as specifically and intentionally limited in this way right about that?
Tom Gies: I start with Pilot Life and Mertens where the Court is clear in stating that ERISA represents a series of political compromises, not all of which were in favor of plan participants. ERISA is thus fundamentally different from other employee protection statutes. Encouraging plan formation, through the tax laws and otherwise, seems to me to be a cornerstone of the statute. And, of course, it’s not accurate to say that people like Mr. LaRue have “no recourse” in a situation like this. From what we know from the record, this is a case that could have been avoided by a telephone call. If you want to sell 100 shares of stock, you probably call your broker and place the trade. If you don’t get a confirmation order pretty quickly, you’ll call back, and if you don’t get a satisfactory answer, you’ll call her boss. If the boss won’t help you, you’ll escalate the situation until you get your trade executed. People like Mr. LaRue who want to trade securities in their 401k plan accounts have a variety of remedies available to them; they just don’t have a cause of action for compensatory damages based on a lost profits theory.
Blog: I shouldn’t put you on the spot, but I will - want to hazard a guess as to the outcome of the LaRue case?
Tom Gies: The Fourth Circuit will be affirmed 5-4, with the majority concluding that it is up to Congress to decide whether to extend the remedies currently set forth in Section 502.
Protecting Corporate Officers from Fiduciary Exposure
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Here’s an interesting article on one particular aspect of ERISA breach of fiduciary duty cases, namely the targeting as defendants of executive officers of the company sponsoring a pension or 401(k) plan; the gist of the article is that there are tactical and psychological benefits that accrue to counsel representing plan participants when they name officers of a company as defendants in such actions and allege that they are plan fiduciaries. Discreti