The American Conference Institute (ACI) hosts a comprehensive ERISA litigation conference twice a year, in New York in October and in Chicago in April. Fall in Manhattan and spring in Chicago. What’s not to like?
Beyond that though, the conferences have always provided a detailed and in-depth look at the hottest current topics in ERISA
I wanted to take advantage of the cold, dark, peaceful days of mid-January (do New Englanders still grow up reading Ethan Frome, with its perfect depiction of a classic, pre-global warming New England winter?) to talk briefly about an important First Circuit decision that slid somewhat under the radar when it was issued just
Tom Clark, who writes the excellent Fiduciary Matters Blog, gave me either a late Christmas or an early New Year’s present when he forwarded me, last week, the district court’s December 30th decision in Spano v. Boeing, which addressed numerous issues related to excessive fee litigation but, in particular, discussed the relationship of
In the ways that matter right now, not that much. Here is a more detailed look, by focusing on certain union pension plans, at the move towards cutting benefits in multiemployer pension plans that I talked about in my last post. It’s interesting for the details it provides on these particular circumstances, but it
So, I have discussed before – many times, actually, in the wake of Detroit and similar experiences with municipal finances across the country – that public pensions pose a moral, political and economic dilemma. They are underfunded (even many of the ones that aren’t in the news) and something, someday, is going to have to
This caught my eye, partly because I sat on a panel recently discussing the fiduciary exception to the attorney-client privilege in the context of ERISA litigation. This, in this case, is a Bloomberg BNA ethics webinar on “Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product Doctrine Issues,” which includes, of particular note to me, “[t]he surprising
The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting, if superficial, story on tougher scrutiny of ESOP transactions and how that is impacting smaller companies with ESOP programs. As the article pointed out, ESOPs in that context are very much a tool for the owner/founder class to cash out their equity developed by building the business &ndash
Well, some of you may recall that when I joined Twitter, I originally did it so that I would have an additional outlet to point out and comment on the various interesting articles and commentaries that cross my desk. Twitter, though, turned out to be a two way street, with it driving interesting articles
The First Circuit issued an interesting ruling early last month that touched on a number of issues, but one that jumped out at me was its approach to the question of equitable estoppel claims under ERISA. In Tetreault v. Reliance Standard, the Court rejected an estoppel claim, but once again – as it has
With all due apologies to longtime Globe sports columnist Dan Shaugnessy, who would periodically “clean out his desk” by running a column of short bits he had collected, here’s a list, in no particular order, of interesting (to me, anyway) items I took away from ACI’s excellent 8th National Forum on ERISA Litigation in