This is interesting – it’s the story, in abbreviated form, of the Seventh Circuit breathing new life into an excessive fee class action case, by finding that there is a factual question of whether the fiduciaries properly evaluated their options and that the defendants cannot insulate themselves easily from their obligation to properly monitor and test fee levels. Its also an interesting case on the question of the fiduciaries’ obligations with regard to structuring an employer stock fund and on the effect of such choices on returns net of expenses. The case itself is George v Kraft Foods Global, and you can find the opinion itself here.

The case jumped out at me for three reasons. The first is that it runs counter to the assumption, expressed in many quarters, that the Seventh Circuit’s prior and highly publicized ruling in Hecker created a significant barrier, and possibly spelled the death knell, for claims built around excessive fees and costs for plan investment options. Many, including me, thought the Seventh Circuit went too far in that regard at that time, and that excessive fee claims needed to be evaluated on the micro-level of the actual facts of the fiduciary’s conduct to decide whether a claim was viable, which was not the approach taken in Hecker. This latest case out of the Seventh Circuit seems to move in that direction, as it is clearly a fact specific investigation of the issue, one that found that the plaintiffs were free to make out such a case on the actual facts of the fiduciaries’ conduct.

The second is that this ruling thereby fit perfectly with the thesis of my article on excessive fee claims after Hecker, referenced here, which posited that subsequent judicial and regulatory developments would move the case law away from the approach of the court in Hecker and toward the approach taken in this most recent Seventh Circuit case. Time seems to be bearing out my forecast.

The third is the nature of this claim involving breach of fiduciary duty involving employer stock holdings. We all know that the traditional form for such claims is the stock drop case, in which the complaint is that the plan should not have been holding employer stock which then dropped significantly in value. In many jurisdictions, this is no longer a promising approach (although not in all, and for good reason, an issue for another day). Here, however, we see a revamping of the traditional approach to such claims, one that makes the stock holdings aspect of an investment plan a possibly significant basis for a breach of fiduciary duty claim under ERISA. Those plaintiffs’ class action lawyers – what will they think of next?