For those of you who have a professional or personal interest in the ACA, litigation arising from it and insurance coverage for litigation it is likely to spawn, I am speaking on a webinar this afternoon that covers those subjects. If you are interested in listening in (and/or amusing yourself by asking complex questions that will
What Would William Shakespeare Say About Tibble v. Edison?
Years ago I moved from reading fiction for fun to mostly reading non-fiction, not long after reading The Corrections and spending the whole time hearing, in style, tone and manner, echoes in the back of my head of writers as recent as Martin Amis, as old as Norman Mailer, and as somewhere in-between
Initial Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Opinion in Tibble v. Edison
So what does it mean if you are an ERISA litigator who writes a blog and you are too busy litigating to write a post on Tibble v. Edison (even though you have published a widely read article on the case) right after the Supreme Court issues its opinion on the case? I don’t know
Will Church Plan Litigation Lead to an Attack on Governmental Plan Exemptions?
Dismayed at the attention her father was receiving from her teenage friends over dinner in a Chinese restaurant, Sally Draper remarked to the table that her father’s joke about stray cats and slow restaurant service was one he had been making for years. I thought of this when I saw Mike Reilly’s interesting post last
Should Company Officers Run Retirement and Other Benefit Plans?
This is great – I loved the idea of this Bloomberg BNA webinar the minute it popped up in my in-box, just from the title: “Just Say No: Why Directors Should Avoid Duties That Will Subject Them to ERISA.” I have written extensively on the idea of accidental fiduciaries, and the manner in
Company Stock in Retirement Plans: Where Lies the Line Between Prudent and Imprudent Conduct?
Chris Carosa at Fiduciary News highlighted this New York Times article in his twitter feed the other day, in which the author argued that there is no reason, from the point of view of a participant/employee, to hold large amounts of company stock in a retirement portfolio (as opposed to, say, as part of a
What Does Teamsters Local 710 Pension Fund v. The Bank of N.Y. Mellon Corp. Tell Us About the Current Judicial Approach to Breach of Fiduciary Duty Cases?
For many years, I argued on this blog that courts, when it came to ERISA breach of fiduciary duty cases, were too slow to decide cases on the facts and too quick to decide them on the basis of judicial assumptions or, worse yet, legal presumptions. I criticized this roundly in my article "Retreat
Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Preemption and Liberal Pleading Rules
I obtained dismissal of a breach of fiduciary duty claim, as well as state law claims, against my clients in an opinion filed on Friday. While long time readers know that I won’t comment substantively on rulings involving my clients, the opinion is worth a read on at least two substantive points involving breach of
Back to the Future: Learning from the Past and Looking into the Future of 401(k) Advisor Fees
So, my past two Mondays have been bookended by being quoted in a pair of excellent articles concerning the operation of 401(k) plans, one in Pensions & Investments and the other in Fiduciary News. The interesting thing about them is that one is about looking backwards, and the other about looking forwards. In the Pensions