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
Me, Tibble, Pensions & Investments and Don Draper
ACI’s 9th National Forum on ERISA Litigation
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
How Do You Win an ERISA Estoppel Claim in the First Circuit?
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
What Does Spano v. Boeing Foretell About the Future of Excessive Fee Litigation (and about the Future Ruling in Tibble As Well)?
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
What’s the Difference Between Public Pensions and Union Pensions?
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
Coming Soon to a Private Pension Near You: Benefit Cuts?
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