Susan Mangiero, who brings expertise in finance and investments to the discussion over the propriety of various investments in defined contribution plans and whether their presence in a plan can support a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, has written this interesting post on the issue I discussed here, namely the role of
401(k) Plans
Live Blogging from Bentley College . . .
Live blogging is usually used to mean that someone is attending a seminar and putting up posts about it while there. I mean it differently, that I will be talking live, about the topics I regularly address in my blog posts, at this seminar on May 10 hosted by Asset Strategy Consultants-Boston. The seminar is…
Playing Hot Potato With Employer Stock
This is an interesting piece on one of the most loaded issues in ERISA litigation, namely the potential personal liability of corporate officers who run a company’s benefit plans, in particular their defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s or ESOPs. The article drives home the fact that when CFOs or other officers are named as…
What Exactly is the Investment Drag of Macaroni and Cheese?
This is interesting – it’s the story, in abbreviated form, of the Seventh Circuit breathing new life into an excessive fee class action case, by finding that there is a factual question of whether the fiduciaries properly evaluated their options and that the defendants cannot insulate themselves easily from their obligation to properly monitor…
Excessive Fee Claims After Tibble and Hecker
I thought I would pass along that my article on the law of excessive fee claims under ERISA is coming out this week in the Spring 2011 edition of the Journal of Pension Benefits. Titled “Retreat from the High Water Mark: Breach of Fiduciary Duty Claims Involving Excessive Fees After Tibble v. Edison International,” the…
What Can We Learn From a List of the Best 401(k) Plans?
Funny, this chart from Bloomberg on the top rated 401(k) plans in the country, taken from the BrightScope data. When I first discovered BrightScope’s beta site and blogged on it, I was struck by the fact that if you want a good retirement, you should go to work for the Saudi Arabian oil company. This…
Fiduciary Definitions Change Hand in Hand with the Real World
One underlying theme of much commentary about 401(k) plans is the idea that their replacement of pensions as the primary retirement vehicle for most private sector workers was not intended, and is the walking, talking example of the law of unintended consequences. Seen as it was in its origin myth – as a supplemental retirement…
Pozek on Werewolves
I have mentioned to people in the past that I am reasonably confident that I am the only author of legal information who has managed to link Walker Percy, denied benefit claims and ERISA in the same publication, which I did here in this post. I think that’s a pretty good stupid human trick myself.
Me, Behavioral Finance and PlanSponsor Magazine
Alert reader Tom Obara of Cassidy Retirement Group here in Massachusetts – or as I have taken to calling it during this perpetually snowy winter, East Dakota – passed along to me an article on behavioral finance in January’s issue of PlanSponsor in which I am quoted on the need for plan sponsors to adequately…
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…