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?
Fiduciaries
The Year in Review: Looking Back at ERISA Litigation In 2016
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
DOL 1, Critics of the New Fiduciary Regulations 0: Comments on NAFA v. Perez
A Tale of Two Cases, or Why Bad Facts Make Bad (Stock Drop) Law
I will be sharing a dais with Joe Barton later this month at the 13th National Forum on ERISA Litigation, where we are both part of a panel that is discussing equitable remedies under ERISA. Joe won an interesting case before the Second Circuit recently, Severstal Wheeling Retirement Committee v WPN Corporation, in which…
Whitley v. BP, Stock Drops, and the Outer Limits of Fiduciary Responsibility
There is an old political saying that where you stand depends on where you sit, which, roughly translated, means that people tend to assert positions that are beneficial to their own organizations and employers, rather than based upon a consideration of broader issues. The author of the maxim, Rufus Miles, thinks the idea goes…
Thoughts From the Beach on the Excessive Fee Cases Against Prestigious Universities
Back from spending a week in the great state of Maine (you go, Palace Diner!), but even when I am away, “the sun comes up [a]nd the world still spins,” nowhere more, it seems, then in the world of ERISA litigation. So over the next few days, I am going to try…
Moving on From the Churches, the ERISA Plaintiffs’ Bar Takes Aim at the Universities
Well now. The world’s leading private attorney general of ERISA fee enforcement has now instituted four coordinated lawsuits against the retirement plans of major universities (MIT, Yale, NYU and Duke, as of this writing). I haven’t read the complaints yet, and have only read the industry articles on it (I like this one, and…
Two Reasons Why the Department of Labor’s New Fiduciary Regulations Are Likely to Spawn More Litigation Against Financial Advisers
I wrote the other day about the Department of Labor’s legal position in response to lawsuits alleging that its new fiduciary regulations are illegal, and in that post, I referred to why the regulations have provoked such an outcry, which is that they fundamentally change the manner in which many financial advisers and financial…
Floating a Few Thoughts on Kelley v. Fidelity
I don’t have too much to say about the specific details of this opinion in Kelley v. Fidelity Management Trust Company, out of the First Circuit yesterday on a putative class action against Fidelity related to the use of float income from plan transactions. This is particularly because it is primarily a technical decision…
Challenging the Department of Labor’s Authority to Regulate the Annuity Marketplace: National Association for Fixed Annuities v. Thomas Perez and the Department of Labor
I wrote yesterday on the first complaint filed, in federal court in Texas, challenging the Department of Labor’s new fiduciary regulations, and then within hours, a second such suit was filed. The second suit is a more narrowly targeted action, brought by sellers of fixed annuities and charging that the Department of Labor, for various …