Ouch. Here’s the story of a payroll company that overpaid salary for years to an employee of its client company, because that employee was authorized to provide the payroll company with payroll information and direct it to issue payments; according to the case, she requested additional payments to herself and the payroll company made those
On Spano and Certifying Classes in Defined Contribution Cases
Here is a nice article from Planadviser.com that sums up the recent opinion out of the Seventh Circuit that I discussed the other day in this post, on the propriety of certifying classes of plan participants in excessive fee cases. The article does a nice job of summing up the findings on that issue
How Much Has MetLife v. Glenn Changed the World?
I have been blogging long enough that I can bore people by pontificating about how blogging was easier back in the old days. It’s actually true though, to some extent, at least with regard to my blog, and that’s because when I first started blogging, Paul Secunda, at the Workplace Prof blog, was still posting
Class Actions, the Diamond Hypothetical and the Seventh Circuit
I have written before about the various implications of the Supreme Court broadening fiduciary duty claims in LaRue to allow individual participants to sue for losses only to their own accounts, rather than just for harms suffered by all participants, or in other words, by the plan as a whole; among other aspects, I have
The Ever Evolving Risks of Fiduciaries
Well, I am not sure I could have said this better myself, although in post after post, I have spoken of the increasing litigation risk for fiduciaries, and of the need to respond by emphasizing compliance and diligence in designing and running 401(k) plans. At the end of the day, ERISA has become a fertile
When Does Exhaustion of Administrative Remedies Really Require Exhaustion
Like most lawyers who represent plans or their administrators in denied benefit disputes, one of the first things I check when a participant’s complaint is forwarded to me is whether the participant exhausted all review opportunities with the plan’s administrator. If not, the defense of failure to exhaust administrative remedies needs to be raised. For
On Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest
In my life as a trial lawyer, I have found myself in a recurrent situation, in which a judge or an arbitrator eventually looks at me in an argument over discovery and asks if I really want the information I am after, as it could run against me. I always answer the same way, to
Interview in Fiduciary News
I have written before, on many occasions, about the evolving nature of fiduciary status, and in particular on the shifting regulatory landscape in this regard. Here is an interview I gave to Fiduciary News on the latest proposed Department of Labor regulatory change concerning the meaning of the word fiduciary in the ERISA context. If
Drum Roll Please . . . The Top Ten Insurance Coverage Decisions of 2010
Nothing proliferates around the New Year like top ten lists; I blame David Letterman for it, and believe some academic somewhere in a popular culture department should examine the pre- and post – Letterman frequency of top ten lists in American society. That said, though, my all time favorite top ten list was Letterman’s top
Talking About Compliance is Cheap – Taking Action On Compliance Is What Matters
I talk regularly, of course, about the importance of compliance in the operation of ERISA plans – just take a look at my immediately preceding post for instance – but that is just a fancy way of restating the old saw that an ounce of prevention (in the form of a well run plan) is