I am launching a new series of posts on the blog, starting today, listing five topics from the week just ended that are worth paying attention to, but which any busy person might have missed during the preceding week. For each, I will include a link or two if you want to read more deeply on that particular subject.

It is, if I am being honest, a way to clear off the backlog on my desk of things that caught my attention over the week but that I never had time to write about (or write enough about) here or on LinkedIn.

1. The first is a little (maybe more than a little?) self-referential, but what the heck. I enjoyed it and I think you might enjoy the conversation too. I was a guest on the Real Lawyers podcast, discussing twenty years of writing this blog. If you are interested, you can read more about it in this post on the Real Lawyers Have Blogs blog, which provides links to the podcast and a list of highlights (and where to find them in the podcast). If by now you still haven’t read enough about, well, me, I talked about the podcast on this blog, here.

2. Pension risk transfers are back in the news. The Southern District of New York allowed one lawsuit claiming that terminating a plan and instead providing the participants with annuities was a breach of fiduciary duty to proceed into litigation. Me personally, I am fascinated to see how the case progresses, what evidence the plaintiffs can uncover to show there was allegedly something wrong with the transaction, and what legal standards the court ends up testing the decision against.

What’s even more interesting about this case to me is that I have been counsel to a plan sponsor and plan fiduciaries in a pretty substantial pension risk transfer, and I think we did a good job and the participants will make out just as well as they would have without the transaction. That said, though, I think this is another of many areas of ERISA where the transaction at issue is exactly as good as the good faith of the plan sponsor and/or fiduciaries. ESOPs are one area in particular where I think you get a good result when plan sponsors, fiduciaries and selling employers are acting in good faith, but a lot of litigation when they are not. I am starting to wonder whether the same may be the deciding factor in pension risk transfers, and the dividing line between ones that do no harm and those that just might be a fiduciary breach.

3. No one, including me, can get enough of the discussion of whether, and if so how, to add alternative investments to 401(k) plans. Here’s the story of a major financial institution looking to fold private credit instruments into an electronically traded fund. Somehow, I don’t think it will be long before someone is trying to get that same fund into a 401(k) plan.

I am still standing by my advice to plan sponsors about how best to handle the push to add alternative investments into 401(k) plans.

4. There has long been an overlap between my tech litigation work over the years and my insurance coverage practice. My first IP work involved copyright infringement cases covered by insurers, who retained me to defend those cases, which in turn led to one of those insureds retaining me to try a patent infringement case. Those relationships likewise led to my infringement litigation defense of a knowledge management start up, including in preliminary injunction proceedings, which from there led to my current work litigating a data breach dispute. Some of this drives my interest in, and writing on LinkedIn and here, about AI adoption in the legal field. See here and here for instance.

AI, however, has now reached the point – as all new industry developments in any field eventually do – where it is raising complications in insurance underwriting and provoking more complex and careful claims resolution. Unsurprisingly, this is leading to more work for lawyers (this provides a certain ironic spin on the claim that AI will actually replace lawyers, when I argue it will actually just increase demand for at least the experienced and better lawyers). I like this article on the subject, and hat tip, as we used to say in the early days of blogging, to Geoffrey Fehling for pointing it out on LinkedIn.

5. Withdrawal liability is just great fun, partly because many employers and companies don’t even realize they are triggering it when they stop using union labor. It’s basically the trailing pension liability that employers owe to union pension plans in that circumstance, and there aren’t a whole heck of a lot of ways for employers to avoid paying it – although there are some. I have litigated the issue before, with some success, and my view is it takes some real substantive and tactical creativity to get a good result for an employer in this type of a dispute. Here’s a great article on an attempt to do just that which was rejected by the Third Circuit.