401(k) Plans

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Not long after I first started writing this blog, the Seventh Circuit began trying to preemptively squelch excessive fee litigation by, at heart, insisting that the invisible hand of the market would never have allowed the type of overcharging of fees claimed by the plaintiffs in those cases and that plan fiduciaries therefore could not…

I didn’t want July to pass without commenting on The Fid Guru’s excellent blog post reviewing excessive fee litigation over the first half of the year and the corresponding state of the fiduciary liability insurance market. I particularly appreciated the extensive discussion of the history of the market for fiduciary liability coverage, as it…

Somehow, Shakespeare seems to have anticipated crypto; the ongoing kerfuffle over offering crypto in the investment menus of 401(k) plans is seeming more and more to be simply “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” For those of you who may have missed it, in the past several weeks, just to hit the highlights, Fidelity…

I have used this anecdote before, so you can jump ahead if you have either read something where I have written it before or heard a talk of mine where I have said it, but if you haven’t, I have always thought it is a good lead in to any discussion of the church plan litigation. A long time client of mine was hired by his employer as an in-house staff lawyer in 1975, and was told that there is a new law, ERISA, and he is in charge of it. He once told me that, in the early years of ERISA, they used to operate by gut, analogy, metaphor and instinct in deciding what some of the terms meant and how they should be applied, given that much of the statute and its structure was, one, novel and, two, had not yet been interpreted by the courts. In those early years, he often had to decide whether a particular plan should be viewed as a governmental plan – which, much like church plans, are exempt from ERISA – and the test they applied was this: if it looked like it was run by a governmental type entity, quacked like it was run by one, and waddled like it was run by one, than it was a governmental plan, as far as he and his team were concerned.
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Continue Reading Notes (and a Prediction) on the Supreme Court Argument on Church Plans

So, Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog has long preached that the key to effective blogging and other social media professional marketing is to provide actual information that people can use, rather than putting out, under the guise of blogging, marketing materials. In my own blogging and in my own practice, I routinely prefer to, and do in fact chose to, work with legal and other professionals who follow this same mantra: they simply think the way I do, and the knowledge they share is useful to both me and my clients.
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Continue Reading CapTrust and Target Date Funds