Here is a very nicely written opinion out of the Third Circuit in Renfro v Unisys rejecting a breach of fiduciary duty claim alleging excessive fees in the mutual fund options in a company’s 401(k) plan. A few particular points are noteworthy. The first is the detailed explanation in the opinion of the reason that the directed trustee, Fidelity, was immune to suit for those decisions. The opinion lays out the written structure used by Fidelity to avoid being exposed to claims of this nature and, quite frankly, it is really well done. Pats on the back all the way around to the Fidelity legal department, or at least that part that over the years has formulated this structure and its documentation. While I mean that sincerely, I mean something more serious as well: somebody over there invested significant resources to get this right, and you see the value of that in this opinion. Investments in ERISA compliance and liability prevention can pay off down the road in spades, and this is a perfect example of it.

A second nice aspect of the opinion is the Court’s nice synthesis of Hecker and Braden, which otherwise can be seen as standing in conflict with each other. However, this leads to the third point, which is that the opinion reasonably and quite intelligently explains that the allegations concerning the mix of investments are not enough to show a breach, even though some of the fund choices were of the retail class in circumstances in which one can assume the sponsor had sufficient negotiating power to avoid that class of investments. As I discussed in this article here, one of the wrong lessons many people took from the District Court opinion in Tibble, which followed a trial of an excessive fee case, was the idea that having retail share classes as investment vehicles is a per se problem and needs to be avoided. That, however, was not really the case in that litigation; what was the problem there was not the use of the retail share classes, but the manner in which they ended up in the investment mix. The Third Circuit’s opinion is essentially driven by the absence of allegations that would match the evidence in Tibble showing that there were errors by the fiduciaries that caused the plan to unnecessarily and improperly carry retail share class investments. Rather, the Third Circuit’s opinion simply rejects the idea that the inclusion of retail share classes alone shows, without more, flaws in fiduciary decision making.