Here’s a great little story by lawyer and blogger Jeffrey Cairns on the IRS disqualifying a professional practice’s ESOP based on significant operational defects, not the least of which was a failure to comply with the plan’s terms concerning eligibility. I like the post because it lays out the nature of the ESOP, the defects, and how those defects led to disqualification clearly and carefully. Often, stories about these types of events tend to speak in broad generalities, or else take the disparate problems in a particular ESOP and the multiple causes of a disqualification and treat them as one undifferentiated mass. Cairns doesn’t do that here, and instead explains exactly what errors were made that led to the disqualification.

The reason the story caught my eye – beyond its clarity – is that it relates to a point of contention I often find myself in with lawyers and financial advisors who tout the wonders of the ESOP form. ESOPs certainly have their place, and can, when used correctly and with the right intentions on the part of a company’s owners or founders, be a very important tool. I have found over the years, however, that some ESOP advocates, and especially lawyers who defend them against suits by participants or regulators, sometimes seem to have a “see no evil” approach to ESOPs and to treat all criticisms of the form as illegitimate. I have always thought that this view goes too far. It has always been my opinion that ESOPs are wonderful in theory, but in practice, they are only as good as both the intentions of those who found them and the competency of those who run them. When ESOPs are put in place properly, run competently, and installed with the interests of the plan participants at heart, they are a wonderful thing. However, as the case of disqualification depicted in Cairn’s post reflects, this isn’t always the case. No matter what promoters of that corporate form argue, ESOPs are not the be all and end all unless they are run right and with the right intent. Cairn’s story of the disqualification of one small firm’s ESOP well illustrates that point.

Like many, I took some time off over the holidays. Unlike many, who used the time to do fun things like go skiing, I used the time to sit down with three fingers of my favorite small batch craft brewery bourbon and write a top ten list for my blog. Here, without further ado, is my top ten list of things from 2015 that are somehow related to ERISA and my practice:

1. Favorite 2015 movie about ERISA and employee benefits: Concussion. Although not really about employee benefits and ERISA, its genesis is: see my series of blog posts on the NFL’s effort to avoid granting disability benefits to the great Steelers center, Mike Webster (here, here and here). The real story behind the NFL’s attempt to avoid responsibility for CTE and head injuries harkens back to the courage of Webster’s family and the talent of their lawyers, who took on the NFL and its constant stonewalling on the issue, and won.

2. Most enjoyable city I had never been to on a business trip before: I had an absolutely fascinating two day trip to Richmond for a deposition; what a great city. From the international cycling championship it was hosting while I was there, to the history of alligators in the lobby of the Jefferson Hotel, to the hip downtown neighborhoods with cobblestone streets, to the great meal I had at Lemaire, more was packed into a 30 hour stay than I could have imagined. As a civil war and colonial history buff, being able to squeeze in a walk around the Thomas Jefferson designed capitol (with great commentary from a park ranger I chatted with) and seeing the Jeb Stuart and Robert E. Lee monuments (on the advice of a helpful hotel concierge), the whole trip was a blast. Provoking the other side’s expert into answering a question at his deposition with the one word reply “Duh” just made the whole trip even more fun.

3. Best business meal (excluding meals with clients, so I don’t leave anyone out): Dinner at BLT Prime in New York, with two of my fellow speakers on a panel on fiduciary governance, Al Otto of Shepherd Kaplan and Peter Kelly, the Deputy General Counsel and Chief Employee Benefits Counsel of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Great food and high level conversation that would only appeal, I have to admit, to an ERISA geek.

4. Most satisfying judicial decision (personal case load division): After approximately five years of litigation, including a week long jury trial, convincing the Pennsylvania Superior Court (for those of you not familiar with that state’s court system, the Superior Court is its intermediate appellate court) to not just reverse a $1.4 million verdict against my client, but to also enter judgment in favor of my client. Its one thing to win an appeal, but, as all trial and appellate lawyers know, its hard enough to flip a jury verdict on appeal, but to actually get a jury verdict reversed outright (in favor of entry of a JNOV) is a rare event indeed.

5. Most unsatisfying judicial decision (non-personal case load division): Tibble v. Edison, by the Supreme Court this past summer. As I discussed here, it rendered the whole appellate history of the case much ado about nothing from a jurisprudential perspective.

6. Most interesting ERISA decision that flew under the radar: Osberg v. Foot Locker, Inc., 2015 WL 5786523 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 5, 2015), which attracted comparatively little discussion, given the depth of the Court’s analysis and that it was issued by one of the country’s most respected courts. What I liked most about it was that it emphasized the fact that plan communications are, contrary to what many believe, a central part of fiduciary responsibility. To quote the Court, “[t]he most important way in which the fiduciary complies with its duty of care is to provide accurate and complete written explanations of the benefits available to plan participants and beneficiaries.”

7. Best presentation I attended: A tie between two panels of magistrate judges, each discussing issues involving ERISA, discovery, spoliation and the amendments to the federal rules; the first was at ACI’s Chicago installment of its ERISA litigation conference in April 2015, and the second at ACI’s New York ERISA litigation conference in October 2015. At the former, I had asked the panel a question which led to a conversation afterwards with a magistrate judge from out west on the subject of spoliation and exactly the effect he believed the changes to federal rules would have on that issue. At the latter, a diverse group of judges held court (pun intended) on topics ranging from when discovery in benefit claims should be allowed to whether – and if so to what extent – the changes to the federal rules, despite all the effort put into them, would actually alter day to day discovery practice and litigation.

8. Best selfie (written version): Chris Carosa of Fiduciary News’ interview with me, which you can find here. Lot of fun, as Chris always has his finger on the pulse of the industry and thus both asks the important questions and elicits informative responses (and not just spin or marketing drivel).

9. (Probable) First line of my (professional) obituary: Named one of the nation’s top 15 ERISA lawyers in 2015 by the National Association of Plan Advisors.

10. Best Article I wish I had Written but That I am Not Funny Enough to Have Written: “Declarations: The Coverage Opinions Interview With The Grinch Who Stole Insurance – A Career Spent Denying Santa’s Claims.”

And with that, Happy New Year everyone.
 

This is so simple, its brilliant, and so brilliant, its simple – or something like that. The “this” I am talking about is the idea of appointing a Chief Retirement Officer, or CRO, as is discussed – and proposed – in Steff Chalk’s article, “The Advent of the Chief Retirement Officer,” in the latest issue of NAPANet. Essentially, he proposes that companies appoint a senior officer with overall responsibility for retirement plans, whether they be pensions, 401(k)s or what not. CROs would have responsibility for the types of issues that bedevil plans in the courtroom, such as overseeing revenue sharing and fees, as well as for the type of operational issues that often invoke fiduciary liability and equitable relief risks, such as the communication errors in Osberg. The brilliance and the simplicity of the idea stem from the exact same data point: it is the lack of knowledge, lack of interest, lack of time and lack of concern by company officials appointed to committees overseeing retirement plans, and who are just moonlighting in that role from what they consider their real jobs (like CFO, etc.) that are the cause of an awful lot of operational failures, litigation exposures, fiduciary liability risks and large settlements in the world of retirement plans.

I spoke and blogged recently about the nature of fiduciary liabilities in plan governance operations, and the theme of both my speaking and writing was the fact that officers overseeing plans are often shoehorning that work into the cracks in their otherwise busy schedules. By this, I don’t mean to suggest anything malevolent, or even intentional. Rather, it is just a fact of life. Counsel to plans are not loathe to note that they have to make a call as to how much of a governance committee’s limited time to tie up with a particular issue. Moreover, court decisions reflect that fiduciary breaches are often based on actions taken with limited discussion, limited knowledge and with a limited investment of time. When I say this, bear in mind that I am talking about cases that are litigated to at least the summary judgment stage, providing a factual basis for a court to find such facts; as a result, the cases I am describing are outliers, rather than a representative sample. Nonetheless, they still reflect the fact that it is the lack of expertise and the insufficient investment of human capital at the highest level of a plan sponsor that is often at the heart of fiduciary liabilities. Indeed, it is hard not to think of a major decision that ran in favor of participants in this area that did not have, among its factual bases, at least some evidence that those making the challenged decisions were ignorant about a key fact or important element of the investment world: think, for instance, of the key role in Tibble of the lack of knowledge about the nature of retail and investment fund choices.

And that’s the beauty of the CRO idea: the assignment of duties related to retirement plans to one individual who not only has the expertise to do the job well, but also has that as his or her only assigned job duties. If the nature of a fiduciary breach is found in an imprudent process – and it is – the assignment of such duties to a properly selected and qualified CRO with the time to do the work is a walking, talking barrel of evidence that a prudent process existed.
 

 

I have been thinking, more than is probably healthy, about all the hue and cry over refereeing errors in pro football, particularly on the questions of, first, whether there are more errors than there used to be (or whether instead it just seems that way) and, second, why I don’t really care, despite every other sports fan I know getting all up in arms about it. First off, lets set the stage, and narrow down what we are talking about here. The pro football world, from twitter to mainstream media, is all focused on officiating errors among pro football referees, and even more on the bizarre sight of endless, play stopping conferences among officials who are meeting to try to figure out the latest officiating faux pas (I have to say, judges decide complex evidentiary issues in the middle of a trial, on the fly, with much more of real meaning at stake, much quicker than it ever takes a bunch of football refs to figure out something that, once the game is over, really doesn’t have any lasting significance).

I don’t remember officiating being such an issue in the past, and I have been watching football since, well, never mind . . . Suffice it to say, I remember watching Mike Webster play center for the Steelers, long before he became the centerpiece of a professional interest, namely his central but extremely sad role in a fascinating piece of ERISA LTD litigation against the NFL over head trauma, which occurred long before head trauma in football became a national issue (you can find one of my posts on it here). Is officiating worse now? Is the game more complicated and the refs now can’t keep up without making endless errors and needing endless conferences? One would think so, from everything you read about it and all the truly absurd conferences among officials during games. But I don’t think that’s the case at all, and instead its more like what happens when the medical community begins to focus on, or develops a new test for, a particular illness – that illness doesn’t actually become more prevalent in the population as a whole, but instead is simply diagnosed more often. And I think that’s the story here – refs have become a focus of attention, and now everybody is paying endless attention to every mistake they make, whereas in the past most would have been ignored. (I mean, really, does anyone actually care that a game between the 3-7 Ravens and the 4-6 Jaguars ended on a blown call?)

When I played high school sports (as an ERISA geek, I feel obliged on occasion to remind people that I also have five high school letters in two sports), we were always told not to complain about the refs after a loss, that they had almost certainly fouled up calls against both teams, and that they were never the real reason for a loss. Today, with the obsession on trying to expand instant replay across sports to take the human element, along with its concomitant inevitable errors, out of officiating, we seem to have lost that belief, replacing it instead with an obsession over officiating, with the inevitable outcome that now, all we seem to talk about is the refs and all we seem to watch is refs meeting in the middle of the field to decide what the call should be. Perhaps we would all be better off if we just admit that sports are a human activity, that human error is therefore inevitable, and, since we are not talking about a moon launch here, that is just fine. Certainly, watching the games would be a lot more fun if the refs just ran over, made a call, didn’t worry about being overturned by the “eye in the sky” of instant replay, and then we all moved onto the next play, rather than stopping everything so we can all watch a bunch of zebras huddle up.

More importantly, though, I have been thinking about why this issue has been bothering me so much, like a little pebble stuck in my shoe, and last week, speaking at ACI’s Employee Benefits Plan conference in New York, the reason dawned on me: it’s the belief that, if we just impose enough technology – like instant replay – we can take human error out of human endeavor, which is nothing but a chimera. I was speaking at the conference on the subject of fiduciary liabilities that arise out of errors in plan governance (you can find my slides here), and I was discussing that the nature of fiduciary liability under ERISA in a lot of ways can be reduced, in plain English, to the question of whether an investment committee or other group running a plan had acted as a reasonable, intelligent, informed, experienced person would in running the plan. As I explained to the audience, which was made up of lawyers who counsel and run such plans, if the company officers involved in plan management think of their role this way, and apply this standard to themselves, they will significantly reduce the likelihood of being sued and, if sued, reduce significantly the likelihood of being found liable at the end of the case.

I also talked about the importance of accurate communications and never appearing to sandbag (whether intentionally or unintentionally) a participant, whether outside of a formal claim or as part of a claim process. I talked about the fact that errors in plan communications are becoming a cutting edge basis for imposing fiduciary liability to an extent previously unseen (see, e.g., Osberg, discussed here), and also that poor habits in this regard in plan governance can simply be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and provokes a participant to sue, in situations where the participant might otherwise have skipped going to court.

And at the end of the day, the central element of all of these (and many other) issues with regard to ERISA plans is that we are dealing with humans here, not robo-advisors or whatever else (like target date funds, for instance) that people want to think can take the messiness out of plan governance, pension investing, 401(k) decisions and the like. Instead, like officiating in sports, plan governance cannot help but have human error baked in, which is why, if you get to the heart of it, ERISA litigation doesn’t focus on the outcome of plan governance but instead on the process of how the outcome came about: was there too much human error, or was enough effort and thought put into the process that brought about the outcome? Fiduciary liability under ERISA resides right at the heart of that question, and in the answer to it in any given case.

Here is a wonderful analysis – which manages to both review its past and guess intelligently at its future – of Montanile v Board of Trustees of the National Elevator Industry Health Benefit Plan, the latest Supreme Court case to try to determine the scope of equitable remedies available under ERISA. Montanile, scheduled to be argued on November 9, is yet another case trying to establish the rules as to when a plan can recoup, out of a participant’s litigation recovery, the medical expenses it paid for the participant. Any experienced personal injury lawyer, whether plaintiff or defense side, will tell you that repaying most liens out of a recovery is a no-brainer, something that is accepted as a matter of course, but these usually involve workers compensation liens. What complicates the scenario here is, quite simply, ERISA, something which many lawyers who don’t practice in the area would insist always complicates things. More specifically and precisely, what complicates this particular case is the fact that the medical expenses were paid by an ERISA governed plan, and the recovery was spent by the participant without first repaying the expenses to the plan. ERISA complicates the question of whether the plan is entitled to repayment because, first, ERISA provides a limited group of remedies and the claim for repayment must be shoehorned into them if it is to succeed, and, second, ERISA pulls in historical concepts of equity jurisprudence for purposes of making this decision.

The fact that these two factors may alter an otherwise expected right to reimbursement is somewhat ironic here, in a what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander kind of way. These elements –the limited remedies available under ERISA and the tight limitation on equitable remedies in the ERISA context – have long complicated participants’ ability to recover from plans and fiduciaries; now, here, they complicate a plan’s ability to recover from a participant.
 

The good people at Fiduciary News gave me a soapbox, and I was happy to climb up on it. They interviewed me as part of their series of monthly interviews on ERISA and related topics, and I discussed ERISA litigation and a wide range of related issues. You can find the “Exclusive Interview: ERISA Attorney Stephen Rosenberg Says Litigation’s Legacy is Improved Plan Design” here.  You will see I went on for a bit, as I am wont to do when anyone wants to talk about ERISA!

Is Osberg v. Foot Locker a tipping point? Only time will tell, but it has that feel about it.

I have written extensively in the past on the orphan-like status of equitable remedies in ERISA litigation related to plan communications: all agree that a range of traditional equitable remedies is now open to participants, but courts have been very reluctant to adopt them, both doctrinally and as a practical matter, where the dispute concerns a disjunct between what a plan provides and what plan communications state. As I have written before, when participants in ERISA governed plans seek equitable relief, circuit courts of appeal seem intent upon reading in stricter requirements for equitable claims than exist in other areas of the law, and on enforcing existing elements of traditional equitable remedies more strictly than they do in other types of cases. I have argued that, underlying this tendency of the courts, is an understandable concern about the risk of turning every ERISA case into a “he said, the plan administrator said” case; judges do not want to birth equitable approaches to ERISA cases that turn every dispute into an argument by a participant that he or she was told something different, perhaps by a low level HR contact or perhaps in a written plan communication, than is actually provided under the express terms of a plan itself, with the participant arguing that he or she is therefore entitled to what was said rather than what was written in the plan. One can easily see a broad view and application of equitable remedies in the ERISA context, particularly with claims of equitable estoppel, giving rise to such a circumstance.

I have also always thought, however, that the concerns underpinning this view are overstated. There are, in fact, many instances in which a participant has a serious, well-documented claim of being told in writing one thing, under authorized or required plan communications, and then being given something else under the plan. There is no reason why, when there is a sufficient evidentiary basis to support the claim that a participant was misled about plan benefits, that the participant should not be allowed to proceed with an equitable remedies claim in that context, and, if the participant can prove it, to then be awarded the benefits he was led to believe existed. In that scenario, this type of case simply becomes like every other claim for equitable remedies, in every other context of the law that I can think of: if you say the defendant misled you and you should recover more as a result, then prove it on the evidence. It doesn’t require doctrinal bars or judicial reluctance to recognize equitable claims to avoid excessive litigation in ERISA cases over these types of circumstances; all that is required is testing the evidence just as would occur in any other type of case.

In fact, any concern that openly adopting and enforcing equitable claims in the context of ERISA will give rise to endless numbers of meritless claims is unwarranted. Preventing this “parade of horribles” requires nothing more than a strict interpretation and forceful application of Iqbal and Twombley – if the plaintiff cannot show the elements of an estoppel claim, for instance, based on significant factual support in pleading the claim, then the plaintiff’s claim can and should be tossed out on a motion to dismiss. Wasn’t this the original point of those two decisions, and the extent to which they raised pleading requirements? To bar the courthouse door to claims where the plaintiff cannot actually plead a factual basis for all of the elements of a claim? Courts can successfully bar the courthouse door to unfounded equitable relief claims under ERISA simply by strictly enforcing the pleading requirements of Iqbal and Twombley, and thereby dismissing estoppel and other equitable relief claims that do not have a substantial factual basis.

Nonetheless, there has been ample skepticism in the case law over the past few years towards equitable relief claims brought under ERISA. A couple of weeks ago, however, in Osberg v. Foot Locker, the Southern District of New York gave broad equitable relief to participants based on a reformation theory. In a well-reasoned 83 page opinion, the Court explained that there was more than sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the participants were actively misled about the extent of their retirement benefits. As one excellent summary explained:

U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that the plan’s summary plan description (SPD) as well as other communications to participants failed to inform them that their benefits would be in a period of “wear-away” during which new accruals would not increase the benefit to which a participant was already entitled. . . . “Here, there is no doubt that Foot Locker committed equitable fraud,” Forrest wrote. “It sought and obtained cost savings by altering the Participants’ Plan, but not disclosing the full extent or impact of those changes.”

The Court ordered that “the plan must be reformed to actually provide the benefit that the misrepresentations caused participants to reasonably expect.”

Importantly, the Court’s opinion was based on substantial and extensive evidence proffered to show misleading statements about the benefits, the effect of those statements on participants, and the manner in which they differed from the actual plan terms. Enforcing equitable remedies under ERISA by focusing on whether the evidence supports the charge, as Osberg shows, is all that is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff when participants come to court challenging plan decisions based on equitable remedies.

So is Osberg a tipping point that may lead the way to a less grudging view by the courts of equitable relief claims under ERISA where allegedly misleading plan communications are at issue? Time will tell, but it has all the indicia that past tipping points in other areas of ERISA litigation, such as excessive fee disputes, have had: a well-reasoned decision by a well-respected court, well-founded in the evidence. If the Second Circuit eventually affirms it, I think we can all expect that, yes, in fact, a tipping point on these types of claims has in fact been reached.
 

Its entirely politically incorrect in 2015, and rightfully so, to ever equate litigation (or football, or anything else) to war, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are historical lessons to be learned from military history and wonderful allusions and metaphors to be drawn from it. See, for instance, my early article on excessive fee litigation under ERISA, which predicted that early defense rulings would eventually give way to favorable plaintiff rulings; to capture that idea of fortune shifting from one side to the other, I borrowed, for the article’s title, the American Civil War concept of the high water mark, which was the furthest point north that the Confederacy advanced into Pennsylvania before the tide turned on the Confederacy once and for all.

This morning, again, something about litigation drew me back, for a historical reference, to the Civil War, namely to the battle of the Wilderness, where soldiers fought among such dense forests that they effectively could not see the forest for the trees, in a nearly literal sense. Those of us who litigate insurance related disputes on a regular basis often likewise get lost in the trees, focused on the specific details of whether a particular claim is covered or not, and whether an insurer did the right thing (or acted in bad faith, to use the legal concept) in a particular situation.

However, the picture of the insurance industry, from 30,000 feet and looking at the forest as a whole, is brighter than that which a narrower focus on the specifics of an individual claim would otherwise paint. Eamonn Freeman, Managing Director of an insurance company based in Ireland, has created an interactive presentation of the world’s largest disasters, and the scale of the insurance payments arising from them. As you flip through it, just think how much worse the suffering from these catastrophes would have been without insurance companies, which is the most interesting lesson, I think, that you can take from the presentation.
 

Two small notes today that I wanted to pass on. Each stuck in my mind as the possible foundation for a substantial blog post, but I have found that once items like this start to pile up in number, it can be quicker and more useful to get them out in a shorter post. Sports columnists, like the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy, used to describe columns full of small notes that were picked up along the way with none sufficient to warrant a full column on their own, as “clearing out the attic of my mind.” If I really set out to do that, we would be here awhile, but I am limiting myself to two items today: we can call it more like “cleaning out the corner of a desk drawer of my mind,” rather than the whole attic.

One of them was this article in Planadvisor titled “Do Retirement Plan Advisers Have a Duty to ‘Rat?’” Really, how can you not read an article with that heading? Although the headline sounds like clickbait for anyone in my line of work, it is actually a substantive discussion of a real problem, namely, when, given the risks on one hand of co-fiduciary liability and, on the other hand, of losing a client, a service provider should speak out about questionable or even illegal acts by a plan sponsor. One of my favorite southerners turned New Hampshire Yankee (which is not quite the same thing as a Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but close enough), Adam Pozek, sums up the issue in this quote from the article:

Adam Pozek, a partner at DWC ERISA Consultants in Salem, New Hampshire, says, “It varies widely depending on what type of infraction there is. No one wants the reputation of turning a client in when something small happens, but in a situation where there is outright theft, most would agree the adviser has a duty to report it.”

Pozek also says it hinges to some degree on whether the adviser is acting in a fiduciary capacity. If not, in general, the adviser has less of a responsibility legally. However, depending on what titles they hold, they may have ethical or professional standards to consider. “It’s a judgment call for advisers who are not fiduciaries,” he states.

The other item I wanted to pass along is ERISA lawyer Rob Hoskins’ post on the ERISA Board the other day on this decision from the Southern District of New York noting that medical reviewers in LTD claims are not to be treated as experts for purposes of the federal rules of evidence and that their reports, on which LTD insurers and administrators rely in deciding LTD claims, are not subject to the Daubert standards that govern expert testimony. Its worth bearing that point in mind, simply because medical reviewers in litigated LTD claims sit in something of a unique position for purposes of the rules of evidence, in that they fall somewhere in between a treating physician, whose records are often broadly admissible, and an expert retained for litigation, whose testimony is governed by Daubert and the federal rules that govern expert testimony. Neither fish nor fowl, to a certain extent, are such reviewers and their reports for these purposes, but long standing practice has established the admissibility of such reports and the weight to be given them in the context of litigation over LTD claims.
 

Honestly, I couldn’t really care one whit about the little locker room stare down between Roger Goodell and Tom Brady. Its just sports. A spinning teacher of mine once looked out at the class the day after a playoff or Super Bowl loss by the Patriots (I forget which) and said, in the middle of a sprint: “Guess what, Brady’s still a multimillionaire married to a super model.” Sort of sums up my feelings about the whole thing right there.

I do get, though, why so many people care, but what is more interesting to me are the remarkable lessons for lawyers buried in the judicial ruling and the decisions that led up to it, and I don’t mean for a second the question of whether or not Brady really cheated or whether the league could prove he had cheated. Litigators with experience with arbitration and the Federal Arbitration Act always knew, even if – like me – they didn’t bother to follow the case as it weaved along on its merry, monotonous way, that the judicial decision would be about process and the rules of arbitration, not in any way about whether Brady cheated or not. And really, its better that way, isn’t it? Who, really, cares whether a professional athlete pushes the boundaries a little bit in a way that doesn’t physically hurt anyone? We are not talking, after all, about East German sports authorities doping up athletes, or even baseball players voluntarily – but illegally – taking PEDs. We are talking simply about manipulating a ball. Face it: sports was more fun when batters corked bats and pitchers scuffed the ball, and no one called in the lawyers over it. Back then, legal proceedings were saved for things that warranted it and were actually important, like the reserve clause and whether baseball players were legally entitled to free agency or were instead bound, like indentured servants, to the first team that signed them. But I understand that times change and with them, peoples’ priorities and sense of perspective.

But when I said there were real and important lessons for lawyers buried in the decision and its prelude, I meant it. They flow from the errors by the NFL and its lawyers that are the basis for the Court’s ruling. Judge Berman found that a number of clear errors in the process required overturning the suspension, primarily that Brady was not on notice of the potential severe penalties for the conduct in question, that the NFL relied on inapplicable standards, and that the NFL withheld relevant evidence by refusing to allow NFL General Counsel Jeff Pash to testify as to his role in the creation of the evidence – the Wells Report – used to hang the accused.

As I said, these are procedural failings on which the judge overturned the sanction, and don’t even address the question at all of whether Brady did anything wrong. But in these procedural failings are a number of lessons about arbitration and, in a broader sense, the proper role of a lawyer in advising a client.

First, as errors go, those identified by Judge Berman in his ruling would have been obvious in advance to any lawyer experienced in arbitration. As a general rule, you can’t go to court after an arbitration concludes and ask the court to change the outcome by rearguing the merits. Instead, you have to convince the court that the arbitration proceeding itself was so flawed that reversal is needed, either because the procedures used were flawed, the arbitrator was biased, the ruling was so far afield that it reflects a failure by the arbitrator to follow applicable law, or the party that lost at arbitration was deprived of a fair opportunity to present that party’s case. The errors identified by Judge Berman in his ruling, and on which his ruling turned, fall soundly into these categories; if anything, the errors were such a perfect fit for the narrow grounds available for overturning an arbitration ruling that Brady’s legal team essentially went into the court proceedings with a loaded deck.

And Brady’s legal team, led by Jeffrey Kessler at Winston & Strawn, had to have always known this. They had to have known that they were holding a straight flush, or bringing a gun to a knife fight (pick your own cliché). And they wisely advised their client accordingly, by all appearances. Brady and his team clearly understood they held winning cards, and that, unless the NFL buckled in settlement, they should let the judicial process run its course. And that is lesson number one for lawyers and people who hire them: the lawyers need to know the case, the relevant law and the facts well enough to make those kind of calls, and have the experience and expertise to wisely counsel their clients in that regard. If not, what exactly is a client paying for?

The other lessons come from the flip side, which is the NFL’s sound defeat. How could the NFL’s lawyers not have seen the same thing, and understood that the arbitration proceedings had been so flawed that they would have trouble convincing a court to affirm the arbitration rulings? Did they not know? I find that hard to believe. I understand that hindsight is 20/20, and I completely understand the fog of war that can make it hard for lawyers, in the middle of litigating a case, to see clearly every crook and turn of a case in advance. But here, the NFL’s experienced lawyers had to have identified these problems and known that they posed a risk for their client. And although I have no idea what the actual dynamic was that led to the NFL still riding off to Little Big Horn under those circumstances, I have certainly been at this business long enough to identify the possible causes and the lessons they teach. Since the NFL’s lawyers had to have recognized the risks, the question becomes whether they firmly and clearly advised Goodell and the NFL about them. If they did, then the loss is on the client, who is certainly free to decide to move forward with litigation despite knowing about those risks. But the more worrisome question, given the dynamic between lawyers and very prominent clients, is whether the NFL was told firmly and clearly of the risk they were running, or whether their lawyers were instead unwilling to speak that truth to power. Lawyers don’t want to lose clients, especially prominent ones like the NFL. A lawyer gains all sorts of benefits from a client like that, ranging from the financial gain of the billings of that client, to the marketing kick of having a client like that on their roster, to the ego boost of representing such a client. But – and I emphasize that I have no idea what actually happened here – that dynamic can make outside counsel afraid to tell such a client that the client or its case, like the emperor in the famous story, has no clothes.

And in this risk – which as I say, I don’t know whether or not it played a role here – is the lesson for lawyers and, again, the people who hire them. Clients aren’t served, and lawyers aren’t doing their job, in that circumstance. Clients do not benefit from lawyers who are so beholden to them that they won’t tell them the truth, and lawyers are not living up to their obligations if they are afraid to tell the client the truth. Certain relationships require brutal honesty to work well, and the lawyer/client relationship – in both directions – is one of them.

And this then brings into focus a particular facet of Judge Berman’s ruling that really troubles me, both in terms of arbitration tactics and the decision making of those involved here, which is the Court’s focus on the fact that the NFL’s general counsel edited the Wells report (which is, at heart, essentially the prosecutorial findings on which the sanction against the accused rested) but was not required to testify in the arbitration. I am not going to pass judgment here on whether or not the general counsel, Pash, should have been required to testify or whether, instead, the arbitrator could have properly denied a request for his testimony. As I said, hindsight is 20/20 and, from this vantage point, after Judge Berman has spoken, it is easy to say that the arbitrator erred by denying a request for Pash’s testimony. In the course of a particular arbitration, however, there are valid arguments both ways as to whether testimony of a particular witness should be allowed, and I am not certain it is fair to say that, in real time during the arbitration, the answer to that question was always clear.

What I am concerned about, though, is the very fact that the NFL’s general counsel involved himself in this way in the development of the evidence and findings against Brady, i.e., of the Wells report itself. Why in the world would you allow such a senior executive, the legal centerpiece of a major corporation, to insert himself into the process in that way? Pash and his legal department had to have understood that they were putting him in harm’s way, and making him a potential witness in the arbitration. Worse yet, they had to have – or if not should have – seen that this would create the dynamic where either he would have to testify or the arbitrator would be put in the position of precluding his testimony, thereby creating grounds for having the arbitration ruling overturned by a court (as in fact happened). Everyone involved here is too experienced not to have seen this risk from a mile away – as trial lawyers like to say, this was no one’s first rodeo (this is a cliché lawyers at trials usually resort to so as to reassure the trial judge that the lawyers can be trusted to work something out among themselves without the judge’s involvement). So how was this allowed to occur? Was Pash’s team of lawyers afraid to speak truth to power and tell him to keep his distance, whether those were the lawyers in his own department or instead the NFL’s outside lawyers? Or did Goodell, essentially the CEO of a huge corporation, want him involved in that way and his general counsel didn’t want to tell him no?

There is a cliché relevant to both representing corporations as outside counsel and to being an in-house lawyer, which concerns the fear – sometimes legitimate – of business folk that the lawyers just say no about everything they want to do, rather than telling them how to do what they want to do. As I mentioned, this is sometimes a legitimate concern that non-lawyers have about their lawyers, whether outside counsel or resident in the corporation itself. But it is also true that there are times when lawyers – again whether in-house or outside counsel – have to say no, and have to advise their clients that what they want to do is a bad idea. I have no idea how Pash, an extraordinarily senior officer of a multi-billion dollar corporation, ended up in the middle of this mess as, of all things, a fact witness, but it should never have happened. Somewhere along the line, someone abdicated their responsibility of just plain saying no, it’s a bad idea.