I will be sharing a dais with Joe Barton later this month at the 13th National Forum on ERISA Litigation, where we are both part of a panel that is discussing equitable remedies under ERISA. Joe won an interesting case before the Second Circuit recently, Severstal Wheeling Retirement Committee v WPN Corporation, in which
Whitley v. BP, Stock Drops, and the Outer Limits of Fiduciary Responsibility
There is an old political saying that where you stand depends on where you sit, which, roughly translated, means that people tend to assert positions that are beneficial to their own organizations and employers, rather than based upon a consideration of broader issues. The author of the maxim, Rufus Miles, thinks the idea goes
The Centre Barely Holds: ERISA Preemption after Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company
There have been an interesting series of federal court decisions concerning ERISA preemption during the past few months, some of which, in my view, cannot be fairly squared with the United States Supreme Court’s preemption decision earlier this year in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual. I discussed in my recent article in Bloomberg BNA’s Tax
Singing the Praises of ESOPs
I do a lot of litigation related to ESOPs, sometimes for them, and sometimes against them. One thing I have learned for sure over the years is that the well-run ESOPs, where everything is aboveboard and the fiduciaries are clearly acting – and want to act – in the interest of the employee participants, are
The Ninth Circuit Deems the Compensation of Outside Medical Reviewers Relevant in LTD Litigation, in Demer v MetLife
So the other particularly fascinating item – to me, anyway – that popped up in my twitter feed while I was on vacation was this important decision by the Ninth Circuit, Demer v. IBM and MetLife, addressing whether (and, if so, how) the number of reviews done by, and compensation earned by, outside medical
ACI’s Forum on Minimizing Legal Risks in Executive Compensation
Another one of the things I fell behind on during vacation was passing along a special offer if you would like to attend the American Conference Institute’s November conference in New York on Executive Compensation, where I will be speaking on “Separations, Severances and Executive Departures.” The faculty as a whole for the two
Thoughts From the Beach on the Excessive Fee Cases Against Prestigious Universities
Back from spending a week in the great state of Maine (you go, Palace Diner!), but even when I am away, “the sun comes up [a]nd the world still spins,” nowhere more, it seems, then in the world of ERISA litigation. So over the next few days, I am going to try
Moving on From the Churches, the ERISA Plaintiffs’ Bar Takes Aim at the Universities
Well now. The world’s leading private attorney general of ERISA fee enforcement has now instituted four coordinated lawsuits against the retirement plans of major universities (MIT, Yale, NYU and Duke, as of this writing). I haven’t read the complaints yet, and have only read the industry articles on it (I like this one, and
Two Reasons Why the Department of Labor’s New Fiduciary Regulations Are Likely to Spawn More Litigation Against Financial Advisers
I wrote the other day about the Department of Labor’s legal position in response to lawsuits alleging that its new fiduciary regulations are illegal, and in that post, I referred to why the regulations have provoked such an outcry, which is that they fundamentally change the manner in which many financial advisers and financial
Floating a Few Thoughts on Kelley v. Fidelity
I don’t have too much to say about the specific details of this opinion in Kelley v. Fidelity Management Trust Company, out of the First Circuit yesterday on a putative class action against Fidelity related to the use of float income from plan transactions. This is particularly because it is primarily a technical decision