Fiduciaries

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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

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…

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…