Are you, or have you ever been, a fiduciary? Sometimes I am tempted to open a deposition with exactly that question, phrased as a derivation of the famous McCarthy era line. While I doubt I ever would do it, it’s the million dollar question in most breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA. It is
Fees, Me and BrightScope
This is fun – I am quoted in a nice article on BrightScope, which you can find here, reprinted on The Intelligent 401k Advisor blog (you can find the original article on Workforce.com, but you will have to register to get access to it).
When Does Little Recovery Justify a Large Fee Award?
This is a little item about a large award of attorney’s fees in an ERISA case to a prevailing plaintiff in a case involving only several hundred dollars in actual recovered damages, but it caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Factually, as the story goes, the court awarded some $45,000 in attorney’s fees
The Fiduciary Status of Investment Advisors
I often explain to people that as a litigator, I am typically presented with a knotty, tied up problem, consisting of all the decisions and plan choices that have been made in the past that eventually resulted in litigation, and that I then have to unravel the knot into its constituent pieces, which can then
You Say Potato, I Say Potato: Two Different Understandings of What Discretionary Review Means
This is interesting. I have written before on this blog, on numerous occasions, about courts sometimes engaging in a more searching level of discretionary review that, in essence, is not discretionary review at all, at least in the manner it has long been traditionally understood. The common belief, and applied in that way by many
On the Ticking Time Bomb of Public Pension Plans
Wow. When I saw this article about the questionable investment assumptions and increasingly risky investment choices being pursued by public pension plans, the first thing that jumped into my head was the old Yogi Berra line that “in baseball, you don’t know nothing." It seems to hold true for at least some of
A Nicely Supported Overview of Global Warming Litigation and its Impact on Insurers
Well now, I think this is exactly what I said in this post here, as well as elsewhere on this blog in the past. Global warming litigation is heating up (pretty funny pun, huh?), litigation costs from the defense of those cases pose a significant threat to the insurance industry, and insurance coverage litigation
In re Lehman
I have been wanting to post about the decision early last month in In re Lehman Brothers ERISA Litigation, in which the Southern District of New York dismissed ERISA stock drop claims against a number of officers and a named fiduciary, but, as it turns out, I have been too busy using the decision
A Parable About the Cable Man
For reasons too obscure and uninteresting to mention, I have had almost nothing to do with the cable tv industry since, well, it was invented. What’s a DVR, anyway, and why would I want one? But yesterday, I had to obtain digital cable from my local cable company, and called them, braced to be gouged.
Pozek on 403(b) Plans
I always wondered what benefits whiz Adam Pozek did on Sundays, and now I know – he writes excellent blog posts on 403(b) plans, like this one right here! My own experience with such plans has concerned disputes over them, but Adam provides an interesting overview of the regulatory structure of the 403(b) plan