Do they still teach administrative law in law school? I don’t know if they need to bother anymore, because the Ninth Circuit’s exposition of Chevron deference in Tibble, when discussing the 404(c) defense, pretty much sums up everything a practicing litigator needs to know about the subject. It is a first class explanation of the law of administrative deference, as well as a pitch perfect explanation of how one analyzes the issue.

Of import to ERISA, however, is a much narrower and more specific point, which is the Court’s cabining of the scope of the 404(c) defense so as to only encompass participant decisions that take place after the selection of the investment menu, on the basis that this reading matches the Department of Labor’s interpretation of 404(c). Based on this reasoning, the Ninth Circuit concluded that a fiduciary’s selection of investment options is not protected by 404(c). This is, at the end of the day, perhaps the most important aspect of the Court’s opinion, although in the immediate aftermath of the ruling it may well not be the aspect that garners the most comment and attention. However, it is really the one key part of the ruling that expands the scope of fiduciary liability and that adds to the arsenal for lawyers who represent plan participants, in that it clearly demarcates the selection of plan investments as an issue that falls outside of a 404(c) defense. Not only that, but the opinion does so in an articulate, well-reasoned manner, making it likely to have significant persuasive force when the issue is considered by other courts.
 

This is a great story on long running copyright litigation between the Baltimore Ravens football club and a security guard and doodler, over the rights to the Ravens’ emblem. The court bifurcated the case, with liability being tried first. The jury in the liability portion of the case found infringement, but the next jury, in the damages portion of the case, awarded nothing in damages, finding that the plaintiff was not injured by the infringement. I bring this story up for three reasons. The first is that it is a just plain, good old fashioned read, even if you don’t care one bit about copyright law or, perhaps even more unforgivably, the Ravens.

The second though, is the more important one. I have done a fair bit of patent and copyright litigation (especially the latter) over the years, almost exclusively for defendants, and it is a lot harder to actually win and recover significant money on copyright infringement claims than many people – including most lawyers – believe. The headline stories of massive awards in patent infringement cases lead people to extrapolate across the board to other types of intellectual property cases, but those cases don’t actually extrapolate well. The various defenses available to defense counsel in copyright infringement cases makes for a tough road in that area for plaintiffs (much to my happiness, I admit, when I am representing copyright defendants).

And finally, the third point the article drives home is this one. When representing plaintiffs in intellectual property cases, always think twice before deciding to accept bifurcation without a vigorous battle. Its hard enough to convince a jury to find infringement, but once having done so, it is better to move onto damages in front of that same jury, with whom you have presumably already established credibility. Bifurcation forces the plaintiff to reestablish that credibility, and any sympathy, all over again in front of a new jury, and causes the plaintiff to lose whatever momentum led to the liability verdict in the first place. All trial lawyers have their own pet theories; that is one of mine.
 

Well, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed the District Court’s well-crafted opinion in Tibble v. Edison. I discussed the District Court’s opinion in detail in my article on excessive fee claims, Retreat From the High Water Mark. From a precedential perspective, as well as from the point of view of what the opinion foretells about the future course of breach of fiduciary duty litigation in the defined contribution context, there is a lot to consider in the opinion. There is too much, in fact, for a single blog post to cover, or at least without the post turning into the length of a published paper. I try to avoid that with blog posts because otherwise, to misquote a poet, what’s a journal or law review for?

I plan instead, however, to run a series of posts, each tackling, in turn, a separate point that is worth taking away from the Ninth Circuit’s opinion. The first one, which I will discuss today, concerns ERISA’s six year statute of limitations for breach of fiduciary duty claims. The Court held that, in this context, ERISA’s six year statute of limitations starts running when a fiduciary breach is committed by choosing and including a particular imprudent plan investment. The Court held that the fact that it stayed in the investment mix did not mean that the breach continued, and the statute of limitations therefore did not start running, for so long as the investment remained in the plan.

Beware future arguments over this holding. You can expect defendants to regularly argue that this case stands for the proposition that the six years always runs from the day an investment option was first introduced, and that any breach of fiduciary duty claims involving that investment that are filed later than six years after that date are untimely. You can also expect defendants to argue to expand this idea into other contexts, and to ask courts to rule that anytime the first part of a breach began more then six years before suit was filed, the statute of limitations has passed. This would not be correct. The opinion only finds this to be the case where there were no further, later in time events that, as a factual matter, should have caused the fiduciaries to act, or which, under the circumstances of those events, constituted a breach of fiduciary duty in its own right; if there were, then those are independent breaches of fiduciary duty from which an additional six year period will run. Those independent, later in time breaches would presumably be their own piece of litigation, evaluated independent (to some extent) of the original breach.
 

I joked in a tweet the other day that I could be busy for the rest of my professional career if I could just represent all the company officers and officials out there who don’t know they are ERISA fiduciaries until after they are sued for breach of fiduciary duty. The joke was in response to a comment by Chris Carosa of the highly valuable Fiduciary News website about the expanding liability exposure of these officers, whom he dubbed “accidental fiduciaries.”

And it is true that company officers who play roles in company benefit plans – often simply as an adjunct to their usual list of job responsibilities – are sitting ducks for fiduciary exposure. I have spent years extracting company officers, whose real job focus was elsewhere (marketing, or sales, or operations, or the like) from suits against them for breach of fiduciary duty related to company benefit plans that they were involved with simply as a sideline to their “real” responsibilities. At the end of the day, though, what such officers have to understand is that they face potentially significant, and substantial, personal liability under ERISA for problems in the operations of such plans and therefore, if for no other reason than self-preservation, they need to treat this part of their responsibilities as also part of their “real” responsibilities. It can cost them too much money if they don’t.

I was prompted to write about this today by this interview with Samuel Rosenthal, the author of a deskbook on the potential legal liabilities of directors and officers. There isn’t much doubt that the significant risk of ERISA exposure, and the details of how to avoid that risk, need to be in any such book. There are standards of conduct that officers can follow that will avoid liability in this area; actions in contemporaneously documenting that conduct that can mean the difference between winning and losing lawsuits against them over company benefit plans; and issues with insulating themselves prospectively from potential liability for breach of fiduciary duty under ERISA, such as through insurance or indemnification agreements.
 

Longtime readers of this blog know that I don’t comment on my own on-going cases, but that I will pass along interesting decisions from my cases, without much comment or analysis, when I think they provide some value to readers. In that vein, attached is a recent 22 page opinion in favor of one of my clients dismissing seven of eight claims in an ERISA case. I think it provides a very comprehensive examination of the current law of preemption in the First Circuit, including concerning state law claims of misrepresentation, which is a very hot topic right now.

When you approach the Moakley federal courthouse in Boston from the direction of Boston proper, your eye is invariably drawn to a series of quotes engraved on the courthouse wall. I have walked to that courthouse an untold number of times, and still, each time, I read the quotes as I go by as though I have never seen them before. One of the quotes is Holmes’ famous comment that law is the “witness and external deposit of our moral life.” I thought of this after reading this Washington Post article which tries to give a moral dimension to a fact of which ERISA lawyers – both those who represent plans and those who represent participants – are well aware, which is that retirement funding is woefully inadequate in comparison to most people’s retirement goals. As most of us know and as I have discussed in this blog numerous times, pension funding is a substantial problem, to the extent that pensions are the dinosaurs of the retirement plan world, while underfunding of defined contribution plans by participants is the new normal.

For most ERISA lawyers, including myself, the response to this typically falls in the category of yup, what else is new, followed by a shrug and an assertion that plan requirements, funding issues, age limitations and other retirement plan issues have to be managed in a way that recognizes and accepts this reality. The Washington Post article, however, points out that there is a moral element to this evaluation, which is that a correlation exists (or appears to exist, as I am always skeptical of any statistical claims unless and until I am satisfied about the underlying data, as per my discussion here) between wealth at retirement age and life expectancy. I highly doubt that there is much that ERISA really has to say or can do about this phenomenon: the reality is that plans are only required to provide what the plans say they are required to provide, and ERISA basically (and very generally speaking) requires only that. But to the extent this correlation truly exists, then perhaps ERISA, and how it is interpreted and applied by courts, has a role to play, at least at the margins, when it comes to this problem, in the sense that it warrants courts holding plans and their authors to high standards of excellence and competence. This is probably the least, and may well be the most, that ERISA can bring to the table in addressing this issue.
 

Chris Rylands and Lisa Van Fleet‘s recent, very pithy summary of the Department of Labor’s enforcement initiatives with regard to ESOPs has been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks now. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am by their ability to set out, in a couple of paragraphs, pretty much a cheat sheet of everything that really matters in running an ESOP. Focusing on the use of valuations by outside appraisers, they explained that, in the view of the DOL:

[ESOP] trustees . . . have a duty to prudently select . . .appraisers and that, even if the appraiser is prudently selected, the trustee still has an obligation to make sure the assumptions on which the valuation is based are reasonable under the circumstances. [The DOL] also said that trustees should be wary of a seller’s role in selecting the appraiser [and that] trustees should also read the appraisal.

The authors then captured what the DOL identified as key failings in appraisals that can make a valuation suspect:

•No discount applied for lack of marketability;
•Failure to take into account the risk associated with having only a single supplier or customer;
•Inflated projections;
•Inconsistencies between the narrative of the valuation and the math in the appendices;
•Use of out of date financial information;
•Improper discount rates;
•Incomparable comparable companies – for example using a large public company as a comparable to a small private company; and
•Failure to test the underlying assumptions.

What is most interesting to me about this is that, although the authors were focusing on valuation and appraisal issues that risk drawing the attention of the DOL, they have also captured the fundamental issues in breach of fiduciary duty litigation arising out of ESOPs. These types of mistakes by ESOP plan fiduciaries in using and relying on appraisals will support breach of fiduciary duty litigation by ESOP participants, and if such mistakes caused a loss to the plan, will be sufficient to impose liability on the fiduciaries. In contrast, avoiding all of these potential traps is likely enough to insulate fiduciaries of ESOP plans from liability for breach of fiduciary duty.

The takeaway for ESOP fiduciaries? Pay attention to each one of these points in the handling of valuations, and you may prevent not just DOL enforcement action, but being named as a defendant in breach of fiduciary duty litigation instituted by plan participants.
 

This is interesting, right on the heels of all the discussion about the Second Circuit, in Kirkendall, not requiring a participant to exhaust administrative remedies by appealing a benefit determination before filing suit. As I noted in my discussion the other day about Kirkendall, the Court did not require an appeal because the plan did not clearly impose such an obligation. But what if the plan did, in clear language, provide a right and obligation to appeal? Well, the Eighth Circuit has just reminded us that, in that case, an appeal is necessary, and the failure to do so precludes filing suit. The case is Reindl v. Hartford Life and Accident Insurance Co., discussed in this excellent post by the entertainingly named (and entertainingly written) Boom blog.

I have passed along on Twitter (https://twitter.com/SDRosenbergEsq) some of the better reviews that have crossed my desk of the Second Circuit’s recent decision in Kirkendall v. Halliburton, Inc., in which the Court held that a plan participant did not have to exhaust administrative remedies in an ERISA plan where the plan document itself was unclear in imposing such an obligation. Frankly, I wasn’t sure the case itself warranted any more extensive discussion, because I don’t find the Court’s conclusion particularly unusual or controversial in any manner. That said, though, the amount of commentary the case has generated reminds me that, at the end of the day, the Second Circuit is like E.F. Hutton: when they talk, people listen. So to expand on my Twitter thoughts about the case, here are some more expansive thoughts, ones that require more than 140 letters to communicate.

The most important way of viewing the decision, in my thinking, is to remember that exhaustion of administrative remedies in this scenario is not a statutory requirement, and is instead a judge-made doctrine that is based on certain assumptions about ERISA plans and certain premises that are thought to be implicit in the statute. In practice, the imposition of an exhaustion of administrative remedies standard on ERISA claims has generally not been a problem, has worked well, and has been effective in effectuating many of the goals for the statute, such as cost efficiency, limited litigation, and encouraging employers to create benefit plans. That said, however, there is certainly no clear cut basis in the statute for believing that, if a plan sponsor doesn’t clearly communicate the need to appeal within the plan, a plan participant should be required to do so or be shown the courthouse door for having failed to do so. This is essentially all that the Second Circuit concluded: if the plan sponsor doesn’t make it clear to the participant in the relevant documents that certain internal administrative appeals are required, along with explaining how to do that, an obligation to do so cannot be imposed on a plan participant.

This is not a new issue, although the decision in Kirkendall may be the most significant authority to date for this proposition. I have litigated this issue in the past, but most often you see it in one-offs like top-hat plans (or virtual one-offs, like SERPs for just a few executives), where a custom document is created for certain employees to address compensation-related issues, and the ERISA procedural component of doing so is not front and center in the authoring attorney’s mind. Usually, the outcome of any dispute over administrative exhaustion in those situations ends up the same as the ruling by the Second Circuit in Kirkendall for all intents and purposes, but getting to that result is harder than just citing a leading decision from a prominent appellate bench; you instead had to rely on a collection of lower court decisions finding exhaustion to not be required for a multiple of different reasons. Certainly, at the end of the day, Kirkendall will make it easier for lawyers for plan participants faced with this scenario to support their arguments that they can prosecute a claim in court without first exhausting internal administrative appeals, but I don’t think it will much change the outcome from what would have occurred without that decision.
 

There are limits, though vast, to the degree to which words, even in the hands of the most careful draftsperson, can accurately capture concepts, particularly when those concepts concern future events and possibilities. There are likewise limits, though vast, to the degree to which people can anticipate future events. I have written more than once about the impact of these limits of both language and foresight on insurance policies. Because of these fundamental realities, no matter how much effort is put into drafting an insurance policy and anticipating the scope of potential exposures, there will inevitably be losses that either were never anticipated when the policy language was written or that, even if anticipated, were not accurately captured within the chosen wording. It is this phenomenon that constitutes the source of much insurance coverage litigation: either an event occurs that neither the policyholder nor the insurer anticipated and included within the policy language, or one party or the other thinks it bought coverage for or excluded a particular future possibility, only to find out later that the words they chose to use didn’t capture it.

This is true for plan documents, LTD policies, and essentially any contract – words and anticipation aren’t always enough to create a document that fully provides for everything that might happen in the future, leaving the parties to dispute how the document applies when a novel event eventually occurs. This has never been so evident as in this new decision from the First Circuit Court of Appeals, in which the issue arose as to whether the future risk of a relapse by an anesthesiologist who had been diagnosed with addiction rendered the physician disabled for purposes of an LTD policy. The case itself is fascinating, as is, to some extent, the question at its heart: if the currently disabling event has passed, but the participant may become again disabled, is the participant still disabled for purposes of the policy? The question itself sounds like a Zen koan and, phrased as I just have, almost as unanswerable. Almost, but not quite, because the First Circuit found an answer, rooted in the limitations on language and foresight I noted above. The Court found that the risk of relapse rendered the participant still disabled, because the LTD policy did not specifically exclude this risk. So there you have it: if you don’t want to cover the currently rehabilitated participant whose risk of relapse means he can’t go back to work, you better write that down somewhere in the plan or the policy.