I am going to catch up on a number of items I have meant to blog on this week, all in one fell swoop. So here goes:

• I posted before about my appearance in an article in the Boston Business Journal, but one that was only available on-line to subscribers. Here it is in another forum, openly available.

• I, and a cast of thousands, have been saying for some time now that the plaintiffs’ class action bar has wisely latched onto ERISA breach of fiduciary duty theories as an excellent replacement for bringing pure securities actions. As I have discussed in other posts, there are a variety of reasons for this, including easier discovery and possibly easier avenues to recovery. In addition, securities law in the area of what we in ERISA would call “stock drop” type litigation is much more well developed than it is under ERISA, leaving more room for tactical and theoretical maneuvering. Beyond that, the sort of backlash in public opinion, in Congress and in court decisions that existed – at least prior to the most recent market meltdown – with regard to securities class action litigation was non-existent with regard to framing the same types of cases under ERISA. Here’s a dog bites man story out of Business Insurance reporting on this phenomenon. Anyone who has been reading this blog or similar sources over the past few years already knows what the article is reporting, but it is still a nicely done introduction to the topic.

•And speaking of using ERISA for class action litigation, one of the central questions with regard to the increasing use of that statute to press stock drop litigation and its cousin, excessive fee litigation, has long been whether it is a successful tactic. The successful defense of the excessive fee claims in Hecker v. John Deere, in the Seventh Circuit, at an early procedural stage and prior to detailed discovery into the facts of the plans and the fees at issue, strongly suggested that ERISA claims of this nature may be no more likely to get past the procedural stage and into expensive litigation of the merits than a pure securities theory would be. The Supreme Court’s subsequent pronouncements in Iqbal seemed to confirm the approach taken by the Seventh Circuit in Hecker, of testing the legal viability of the underlying ERISA based theories before allowing the plaintiffs to conduct discovery that might more strongly establish the legitimacy of their claims (or lack thereof, for that matter). As many have been reporting, the Eighth Circuit has just essentially taken the opposite tack, in a putative class action case against Wal-Mart, Braden v. Wal-Mart Stores. Braden can be understood, in part, as rejecting the approach taken by the Hecker court and finding that discovery is necessary before the merits of a complex excessive fees type claim can be decided. For more detail on Braden, here is Paul Secunda’s take on the matter over at the Workplace Prof (including a link to the case itself) and Roy Harmon’s take on the matter (which focuses nicely on the Rule 8 pleading requirements) at his always illuminating Health Plan Law blog. I have said before that with the increased focus on fees, the increased focus on the lack of retirement savings of most Americans, and the economic impact of high fees on returns in 401(k) plans, Hecker may turn out, in hindsight a few years down the road, to have been the high water mark for the corporate bar in defending against such claims. I am not sure whether that’s a good or a bad thing (I suspect, actually, that it’s a mix of both, but addressing that in depth here would make for an awfully long post), but it may well be the case either way.