I wanted to quickly pass along, with a couple of comments, this excellent blog post by Scott Galbreath of Trucker Huss on a recent Ninth Circuit decision on interpreting and applying releases of ERISA claims executed by employees. As the post points out, the Ninth Circuit adopted the tests of other circuits, including the First
Years ago, I represented a financial advisor in a dispute with a particular, well-known financial product provider after the advisor concluded that the fees in the annuities offered by that company were both too high and too hidden for him to continue to recommend the product to his clients, and instead recommended that his clients
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
Because I really like lawyering, I am pleased that I have had a very busy and productive February, full of client meetings, filings in courts in various jurisdictions, and interesting work. The drawback, though, is that it is now almost the end of the second month of 2025 and I still haven’t finished my countdown
There is a great article today in the Wall Street Journal on the adoption of 401(k) plans by smaller companies, noting that this phenomenon is driven by both legislative and labor market developments, and crediting these changes with pushing employee participation in 401(k) plans to half of the labor force. All good news, but there
Some things are just evergreen when it comes to ERISA, a point that is driven home whenever, as now, I publish my top ten most read blog posts of the prior year. The Supreme Court just returned, for about the umpteenth time, to the subject of excessive fee class action litigation and the question
Story after story keep telling the same story – that class action litigation against ERISA plan sponsors and fiduciaries is a growth industry. Encore Fiduciary’s Daniel Aronowitz and Karolina Jozwiak have a great, data rich piece out in Planadvisor documenting this fact, and the legal media world is all atwitter about the latest new way
It’s interesting. Blog posts have “legs” (you should get the intentional pun in a minute) for all sorts of reasons, and it can be hard to figure out why in any particular case. With regard to my eighth most popular blog post of 2024, it might have been the great picture of horses
So two stories today give me a soapbox to address one aspect of ERISA class action litigation and the push back from plan sponsors and their fiduciary liability insurers against the costs imposed on them by this line of litigation. One story, which to protect the innocent I won’t otherwise identify, involves court approval of
There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a grandfatherly man talking to a younger man in a library, and he says to him that “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it [while] those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.” Am I the