This is a great article in PlanAdvisor on the recent decision in Tolbert v. RBC. Tolbert is a truly fascinating, and wonderfully instructive, district court decision on one of my favorite topics, and actually favorite things to do (I know it’s a strange interest, so sue me) – which is the litigation of top
Susan Mangiero on Tibble and the Complexity of Monitoring Plan Investments
So, as I and dozens of other observers have pointed out (although I am confident I am the only one who quoted Shakespeare on the subject), the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Tibble drove home the importance of monitoring plan investments, as well as the fact that, dependent on the circumstances, the failure to
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Patenting Retirement Plan Features
You know, you live long enough and you see everything come back around again. Ties get skinny, then they get wide. Standardized testing is seen as the key to everything, then as evil incarnate, then as the key to everything again. Baseball is learning to again look at the quality of the player on the
The Intersection of the ACA, ERISA Litigation and Insurance Coverage
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