When I recommended in a recent pair of blog posts that insurers and plan sponsors should make it a universal practice to try excessive fee class actions to conclusion, I wasn’t being flippant. I have probably spent 25,000 hours over the past thirty years advising insurers on when to try cases to conclusion – or
I didn’t intend to write a second post (here’s the first) on the ever rising tide of excessive fee litigation, but the LinkedIn algorithm, responding to my posting of my first blog post on this issue, hand delivered me another great graphic, this one by Sompo International, on the same topic. What I
This is a great and well-illustrated presentation by Chubb on the history of excessive fee litigation against sponsors of defined contribution retirement plans, on the pace of filings, on the types and sizes of plans that are being sued and on settlements of those claims. What you can see in the data is something that
On the Fid Guru Blog, Euclid Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz has an excellent deep dive on the question of jury trials in breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA, asking the questions of, first, whether they are really coming and, two, if so, is that a good or a bad thing (his take clearly appears to
I didn’t want July to pass without commenting on The Fid Guru’s excellent blog post reviewing excessive fee litigation over the first half of the year and the corresponding state of the fiduciary liability insurance market. I particularly appreciated the extensive discussion of the history of the market for fiduciary liability coverage, as it
One of my partners emailed me the other day with kind words about my blog, and I responded that there was plenty to write about these days when it comes to ERISA and insurance. Amusingly, this morning’s inbox ended up presenting the perfect exemplar. I was sitting down to write some follow up comments on
Somehow, Shakespeare seems to have anticipated crypto; the ongoing kerfuffle over offering crypto in the investment menus of 401(k) plans is seeming more and more to be simply “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” For those of you who may have missed it, in the past several weeks, just to hit the highlights, Fidelity
All men, who after all are all just overgrown 12 year olds, admire Johnny Depp to some degree – a grown man who becomes fabulously wealthy by playing pirate??? Sign me up! But what’s not to emulate, as this article in the New York Times points out, is his sheer malfeasance in handling his own finances. Depp is now involved in litigation with his management company over who is responsible for the financial disaster he finds himself in, and it looks clear that there is more than enough blame to go around for all parties involved.
Continue Reading What Happens When the Pirates of the Caribbean Go Looking for a Financial Advisor to Help Invest Their Treasure?
2016 was the year that church plans went to the Supreme Court, excessive fee claims came to elite universities and the Department of Labor’s authority to alter its regulation of fiduciary conduct was challenged in multiple courts. Of course, stock drop litigation, excessive fee cases, and other assaults on the make up of 401(k) plans continued apace, even if they yielded the spotlight to flashier, more novel types of cases.
Continue Reading The Year in Review: Looking Back at ERISA Litigation In 2016