Two small notes today that I wanted to pass on. Each stuck in my mind as the possible foundation for a substantial blog post, but I have found that once items like this start to pile up in number, it can be quicker and more useful to get them out in a shorter post. Sports
Employee Benefit Plans
What Does Retaliation under ERISA Look Like?
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Employee Benefit Plans, ERISA Statutory Provisions
What’s worse than playing games with your employees’ retirement savings? Well, probably not much, from both a moral and legal perspective. The heavy hand of the plaintiff’s bar, and possibly the Department of Labor, will come looking for you if you do.
But one thing that makes such an event worse for a plan sponsor…
Defensive Plan Building, Otherwise Known as “Minimizing Legal Risks in the Design, Implementation and Administration of Employee Benefit Plans”
I can’t even recall how many times I have written – on this blog and elsewhere – on what I call “defensive plan building,” which is the idea that plans should be designed, built out and operated with the risk of litigation and liability exposure carefully considered and planned for, with the goal of eliminating…
The Problem with Providing Group Life to Employees
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Employee Benefit Plans
Robert Wood, in Jackson Lewis’ Benefit Law Advisor, asks – and implies an answer to – the simple question of whether group employee life policies and plans are worth the risk for mid-size and smaller employers. He points out that conversion and related rights granted by such plans to employees place a significant administrative…
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 …
Should Company Officers Run Retirement and Other Benefit Plans?
By Stephen Rosenberg on
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…
Church Plan Litigation and My New Article On It
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Employee Benefit Plans, ERISA Statutory Provisions
When courts first started tackling the new wave of suits challenging the church plan status of certain health care entities, I thought it an amusing curiosity, at best. I did grasp, however, the impetus from the perspective of the class action bar, which is that, if able to overturn the claimed exemptions of the defendants…
Real Knowledge, Fake Knowledge, and the Duty to Inquire: Time Limitations in ERISA Litigation
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Employee Benefit Plans
As a brief aside, while I continue to work on my promised blog post on the causation/damages aspect of fiduciary duty litigation in light of the Fourth Circuit’s recent and controversial opinion on the issue in Tatum, I thought I would pass along that my most recent article in the Journal of Pension Benefits…
Tatum v. RJR Pension Investment Committee: What it Teaches About Fiduciary Obligations
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Somehow, RJR Nabisco has always been fascinating, from beginning to now. There must be something about combining tobacco and Oreos that gets the imagination flowing; maybe its the combination of the country’s most regulated consumer product with the wonders of possibly the world’s favorite cookie. Heck, its birth even birthed a book and then, in…
Changing Firms, and a Brief Note on the Right of Service Providers to Make a Profit
By Stephen Rosenberg on
So, some of you may have noticed a change on the masthead at the top of this blog, which notes that I am now at the Wagner Law Group , in its Boston office. It has been a pleasure litigating ERISA and business disputes for the past nearly quarter century at the McCormack Firm, but…