Yesterday, the Supreme Court effectively rejected the idea that mutual fund fees, in the non-ERISA context, are not actionable if consistent with the market as a whole, in response to a Seventh Circuit decision finding that a fund did not pay excessive fees to its investment advisor in light of marketplace discipline (I am oversimplifying
Fiduciaries
Attorneys as Fiduciaries
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Fiduciaries, People are Talking . . .
Are you, or have you ever been, a fiduciary? Sometimes I am tempted to open a deposition with exactly that question, phrased as a derivation of the famous McCarthy era line. While I doubt I ever would do it, it’s the million dollar question in most breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA. It is…
The Fiduciary Status of Investment Advisors
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in 401(k) Plans, Fiduciaries
I often explain to people that as a litigator, I am typically presented with a knotty, tied up problem, consisting of all the decisions and plan choices that have been made in the past that eventually resulted in litigation, and that I then have to unravel the knot into its constituent pieces, which can then…
In re Lehman
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Posted in Fiduciaries
I have been wanting to post about the decision early last month in In re Lehman Brothers ERISA Litigation, in which the Southern District of New York dismissed ERISA stock drop claims against a number of officers and a named fiduciary, but, as it turns out, I have been too busy using the decision…
A Parable About the Cable Man
By Stephen Rosenberg on
For reasons too obscure and uninteresting to mention, I have had almost nothing to do with the cable tv industry since, well, it was invented. What’s a DVR, anyway, and why would I want one? But yesterday, I had to obtain digital cable from my local cable company, and called them, braced to be gouged.
On Attorneys Fees and Hecker
By Stephen Rosenberg on
Honestly, I have spent a week scratching my head, off and on, over the Supreme Court granting cert to consider the standards governing when attorneys fees can be awarded in an ERISA case, particularly when they denied cert shortly thereafter in Hecker, which presented the opportunity to address the much more substantive issue…
A Nice Explanation of the DOL Advisory Opinion on Target-Date Funds
By Stephen Rosenberg on
I like this (relatively) new blog here, the Benefits and Employment Observer, by the lawyers at the small – only in numbers – Washington D.C. shop of Bailey & Ehrenberg. This is the cleanest, most easily understood presentation of the findings of the DOL’s recent advisory opinion “addressing the issue of whether the…
Marx on 401(k) Litigation
By Stephen Rosenberg on
I have a stack of substantive ERISA matters that I have been trying to post on for the last week or two, and I am going to try to work through them over the next few weeks. The thing about a blog, though, is the world keeps on spinning, and each day you find something…
Three for Thursday
By Stephen Rosenberg on
I am going to catch up on a number of items I have meant to blog on this week, all in one fell swoop. So here goes:
• I posted before about my appearance in an article in the Boston Business Journal, but one that was only available on-line to subscribers. Here it is in…
On Fiduciary Liability Insurance
I have written before that one of the things that makes insurance coverage law interesting is the fact that almost every trend in liability or litigation eventually shows back up in insurance disputes, in a sort of fun house mirror sort of way. Whether it is corporate exposure for asbestos liabilities, or the sudden invention…