Employee Benefit Plans

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When I started this series of posts that count down the most popular posts on my blog in 2024, I called back, nostalgically, to the old days when radio disc jockeys would count down the most popular songs of the past year and play them, one after the other, over the course of a day…

There is a great article today in the Wall Street Journal on the adoption of 401(k) plans by smaller companies, noting that this phenomenon is driven by both legislative and labor market developments, and crediting these changes with pushing employee participation in 401(k) plans to half of the labor force. All good news, but there…

Some things are just evergreen when it comes to ERISA, a point that is driven home whenever, as now, I publish my top ten most read blog posts of the prior year. The Supreme Court just returned, for about the umpteenth time, to the subject of excessive fee class action litigation and the question…

This is a really good day to be returning to my countdown of the top ten most read blog posts of 2024, because just yesterday, the Supreme Court returned to a central issue in ERISA class action and excessive fee litigation: namely, what are the pleading standards and how can they be used…

Story after story keep telling the same story – that class action litigation against ERISA plan sponsors and fiduciaries is a growth industry. Encore Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz and Karolina Jozwiak have a great, data rich piece out in Planadvisor documenting this fact, and the legal media world is all atwitter about the latest new way…

It’s interesting. Blog posts have “legs” (you should get the intentional pun in a minute) for all sorts of reasons, and it can be hard to figure out why in any particular case. With regard to my eighth most popular blog post of 2024, it might have been the great picture of horses…

Continuing with my countdown of my top ten most read blog posts of 2024 – as chosen by you, the reader! – leads me today to one of my favorite topics, namely the increasing targeting of small (relatively speaking) ERISA plans by class action firms bringing suits alleging that the plans were too expensive. In…

So two stories today give me a soapbox to address one aspect of ERISA class action litigation and the push back from plan sponsors and their fiduciary liability insurers against the costs imposed on them by this line of litigation. One story, which to protect the innocent I won’t otherwise identify, involves court approval of…

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a grandfatherly man talking to a younger man in a library, and he says to him that “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it [while] those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.” Am I the…

The Washington Post has a fascinating article today on the operation of the NFL’s disability claim system for addressing benefits due for neurological impacts from professional football. Although likely behind a paywall, the article is certainly worth a read. Its point is really that the system, which is the outcome of a negotiated class action…