Well, I am not sure how much new there is in this Washington Post article, “A Retirement Storm is Coming,” but I liked it nonetheless. It’s a good story on the problems in retirement financing people face and possible solutions. What I liked most about it are a few points. First of all
401(k) Plans
Do You “Work For” Uber?
You know, the Uber decision out of the California Labor Commission is fascinating, even if it isn’t directly on point with the subject of this blog. It immediately brought me back to the first appeal brief I ever wrote, as a young associate, which concerned, at its heart, the question of whether the plaintiff was …
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…
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…
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 …
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
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…