Susan Mangiero, one of my favorite experts on financial deals and transactions, was kind enough to post on my presentation to the Boston Regional Office of the Department of Labor, where I spoke on common mistakes by plan sponsors. I spoke as part of a day long training program that Susan presented at as well, even if she was too modest to mention it in her post, and I was very pleased and impressed by the audience, their participation and their questions. I have written before that I generally hold a high opinion of the Department’s staff, and the audience participation at the training session did nothing to lessen that opinion. Both in my primary talk, on plan sponsor mistakes, and during a subsequent panel that I participated in on litigation issues, fee disputes, and fiduciary governance of plans, the audience raised great points and asked pointed questions. One member of the audience shared with me an additional important mistake plan sponsors make, that I had not previously thought of as a significant problem, primarily because it is not one that arises in litigation but is instead more of a day to day compliance issue. There is nothing better as a speaker than having walked away having learned something from the audience that you did not know the day before.

Susan’s reference to the “Golf Course RFP,” which actually is a slide in my PowerPoint deck, concerns one of my chief cautions to smaller and mid-size companies, where benefit plans, particularly 401(k)/mutual fund programs, may be chosen by a company owner simply based on the vendors that are already in the owner’s social circle, such as, yes, those at his or her country club. If it turns out down the road that employees were paying too much for or getting too little from the plan, in comparison to what could have been located in the marketplace as a whole at that time, picking a plan’s vendor in that manner will most certainly come back to bite the company owner. Indeed, from a trial lawyer’s perspective, such a selection process would, in a fiduciary duty lawsuit over that plan, be a smoking gun used to show poor processes and a corresponding breach of a fiduciary duty. At the end of the day, RFPs aren’t normally conducted on a golf course, and this is one area of business life where it is especially important to remember that.