It’s the first Friday of the Year of the Horse, making it time for the first Five Favorites for Friday post of the year. As a reminder, every Friday, I do an entry in this series, each of which covers five topics, posts, articles, podcasts or videos that caught my attention over the preceding week
Busy, busy week. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to put Thanksgiving in the fourth quarter but they probably should have given a little more thought to whether a three day week in the middle of the last quarter of the year really makes sense.
Oh well, as I pointed out
I am launching a new series of posts on the blog, starting today, listing five topics from the week just ended that are worth paying attention to, but which any busy person might have missed during the preceding week. For each, I will include a link or two if you want to read more deeply
The common law of ERISA is rife with odd decisions that likely made sense when issued, but, like opening Pandora’s box, led to unintended, unanticipated and arguably wrong rules of law when applied further down the road in additional cases. Heck, there are entire bodies of scholarship arguing that the very existence of a central
How are these two stories related? The first concerns a Nobel Prize winning economist’s proposition that the taxation and political structure of the United States plays a central role in the downward mobility of the American middle class, while the second concerns an investment fund that intends to purchase companies from their founders and eventually
This is an interesting story on Mintz Levin trying to bring more lawyers back into the office by figuring out the best way to get people, starting with the partners, to find it valuable to be there, rather than by threatening associates’ compensation or mandating certain work hours, as other firms have done. My
I enjoyed this article from Middle Market Growth on the intersection of private equity investing and ESOPs. As the article points out, most people think of ESOPs as fully employee owned enterprises, but in fact there are partially employee owned companies where there is room for private equity investments elsewhere in the ownership structure and
I had another conversation yesterday with a financial advisor about bitcoin and crypto in 401(k) plans, a subject on which I have written skeptically in the past. As I am wont to do, I again questioned whether the hunger to add crypto to defined contribution plans is in employees’ best interest, or whether instead
I am quoted in an excellent article in Pensions & Investments by Robert Steyer on the use of independent fiduciaries when providing employer stock in company retirement plans. As many of you probably know, the Supreme Court’s decision a few years back in Fifth Third Bancorp vs. Dudenhoeffer raised the pleading bar substantially for plaintiffs
I have an interesting relationship with ESOPs, both as a matter of my personal preference for corporate designs that place at least some of the value of a company in the hands of those who create that value, and from the perspective of a lawyer who has spent many years litigating ESOP disputes. The two