One of the interesting aspects of litigating ERISA cases is the extent to which, for me anyway, it is part and parcel of a broader practice of representing directors and officers in litigation. From top hat agreements they have entered into, to being targeted in breach of fiduciary duty cases for decisions they participated in related to the management of an ERISA governed plan, directors and officers of all size companies spend a lot of their working life operating – in terms of legal issues – under the rubric of ERISA. In some ways, this is even more true of officers of entrepreneurial, emerging or smaller companies; due to the relative lack of hierarchy or distinct departments, in comparison to the largest corporations, officers of these types of companies often find themselves involved to one degree or another in almost every aspect of the company’s business, including retirement and other benefits that are likely to be governed by ERISA.

For me, one of the more interesting aspects of representing officers and directors in litigation is the question of when, if ever, they can be reached personally for actions that one would otherwise expect to be the responsibility of the company itself. Although lawyers are all taught in law school about the sanctity of the corporate form and the protection against liability it grants to company officers, lawyers quickly learn that, in practice, that is a principle more often honored in the breach. Both common and statutory law offer plaintiffs various ways around the protection of the corporate form, including, when it comes to retirement or benefit plans, breach of fiduciary duty claims under ERISA. The theories of piercing the corporate veil and participation in torts can also be exploited to avoid the shield against liability granted by the corporate form in many types of cases, although those can be difficult avenues to use to impose liability on a corporate officer.

 

All of these issues have one thing in common, which is a question of line drawing, consisting of determining exactly where the line should rest between the protection of the corporate form and the ability to impose liability on a company’s officers. One aspect of this line drawing that has always held great interest for me is the economic loss doctrine, which holds that contractual liabilities cannot be used as the basis for prosecuting tort claims. In the context of defending officers and directors against claims for personal liability based on a company’s actions, it serves as a strong defensive line against imposing tort liability on a corporate officer for the contractual liabilities and undertakings of the company itself. You can find a good example of this defense tactic in this summary judgment opinion issued by the business court in Philadelphia last week in one of my cases, in which I defended a corporate officer in exactly that type of case.

This is great. I have lost count of how many times I have explained my view that arbitration is not, by definition, preferable to litigation for resolving disputes, and that instead, in each and every given case, a party should think carefully about which dispute resolution forum is preferable. I have written and spoken on the idea that, initially, company decision makers should put aside the assumption that arbitration will save money, because it generally does not. There are more controls on the litigation process than are built into the arbitration process and, as a result, if one side or another is interested in bogging down the process in excessive discovery, motion practice, or other efforts, they can more easily run up the costs in an arbitration than they can in litigation. Arbitration, as a result, is only less expensive if both parties set out in good faith to make it that way. If one party sees a tactical benefit in doing otherwise, though, the dynamics of arbitration make it far too easy to turn arbitration into an expensive, time consuming, seemingly never ending event. Judges, as a general rule, won’t allow this to the same extent in court.

Second, there are tactical considerations in deciding between arbitration and litigation, which have to do with the strength of a party’s case, and whether that strength is based on legal arguments or instead on facts. It is my view that a case based on legal theories is better prosecuted in court, for at least two reasons. First, motions to dismiss and summary judgment are effective avenues in that forum to have the court rule, relatively early on, as to the strength of those legal defenses. Arbitration panels are, for various reasons, more often inclined to hold all such issues over for the final hearing, eliminating the possibility of an early outcome without having to engage in a full evidentiary hearing on the evidence. In my experience, the only real consistent exception to this dynamic in arbitrations is when the arbitration panel is chaired by a well-regarded retired judge, who may be inclined to incorporate more of the courtroom structure into the arbitration process. Second, in a case built on legal theories, it is always better to have a second chance to press that theory if it is rejected the first time around, which litigation allows by means of appeal. Arbitration generally doesn’t allow that, as state arbitration acts and the Federal Arbitration Act generally impose very limited rights of appeal from arbitration rulings.

In this excellent article in Inside Counsel, authors Alan Dabdoub and Trey Cox provide empirical support for these views, which have, until now, been based simply on my own years of arbitrating and litigating cases, and of observing the difference between the two. The authors use a comparative study of 19 different cases, about half in arbitration and about half in litigation, to demonstrate that litigation, and not arbitration, can often be the faster and less expensive path for resolving disputes. It is well worth a read.
 

I don’t know how many of you have had a chance to read, or have any interest in reading, the transcript of the argument yesterday in McCutchen, but its actually fairly entertaining. For one thing, it is clear that everyone – litigants, the justices, you name it – are a little flummoxed by the need to go back to “days of the divided bench” to figure out how to handle equitable relief claims under ERISA. The cases cited by the parties are, by definition, archaic, and do not perfectly fit the scenarios arising today. Further, as the argument makes clear, it puts way too much value on treatises, which often – particularly in the insurance context, such as the Couch treatise referenced in the argument – reflect the analysis and synthesis of the authors more than anything else. Questioning from the bench and discussion from the lawyers makes clear that everyone recognizes the effect all of this has on deciding cases. At least two justices, in fact, make what I take to be mocking references to the need to reason and decide as though it was centuries earlier, with Justice Breyer placing a hypothetical in the 15th century and another justice referencing the need to act as though it is the beginning of the 20th century.

This is no way to run a ballclub, pretending that we can figure out in 2012 what a judge, educated only on the legal principles and aware only of the factual scenarios that existed hundreds of years ago, would do with the complex fact patterns and contracts that arise out of a statute that wasn’t enacted until 1974. I have written elsewhere that I highly doubt that the statute’s drafters were deliberately and knowingly incorporating the 19th century into the statute, including when they drafted the remedial procedures. One has to ask then, in that circumstance, how it can make any sense to retreat to the 19th century to decide how to apply that statute. Wouldn’t it make more sense, as a matter of statutory construction and simple commonsense, to ask what equity rule would have applied in 1974 to decide an issue like this and then, if there was no rule governing it at that time, say so and then choose one based on all of the competing factors that the Court normally considers in deciding an open question involving statutory interpretation?
 

I was somewhat stunned – and frankly, to some extent angered – by this article yesterday in Slate, in which a business school professor asserts that, if research from Holland does not support the idea that tax breaks motivate savings, one should do away with the 401(k). This completely misses the point that, in a country where the 401(k) is now effectively the only private sector retirement plan available to most employees, the tax break in question is a necessary element of increasing employees’ retirement assets, and is thus a retirement subsidy, not a savings incentive. As a result, the proper frame of reference for debating whether or not to maintain the 401(k) tax preference is that of retirement policy, in terms of considering whether or not it is the proper approach to creating retirement income for the American public; the proper frame of reference for debate is not the tax code, and the preference’s relationship to the deficit.

DWC’s Adam Pozek has a great post on his blog explaining exactly why the tax preference should not put the 401(k) in the crosshairs of budget cutters and revenue raisers, right here.
 

US Airways, Inc. v. McCutchen is scheduled to be argued at the Supreme Court tomorrow, the next round in the on-going investigation by the Court of the scope of equitable relief available under ERISA. In this instance, the Court must consider the extent to which traditional limitations on equitable remedies are incorporated into ERISA. For those of you needing some background, I thought this was a good discussion of the case. For what its worth, I think everything from the Court’s selection of this case, to the recent Court opinions on equitable issues in ERISA litigation, to the language of the statute, point firmly towards the Court upholding and agreeing with the Third Circuit’s take on this issue. I think at the end of the day, the more interesting question is not going to be whether the Court agreed with the Third Circuit on the narrow points at issue in the case, but instead how many various Pandora’s boxes the Court’s discussion of equitable relief in its opinion will inevitably open up, which litigants and lower courts will have to resolve in the future. When the Court has delved recently into the proper scope of equitable remedies under ERISA, it has tended to answer one question while simultaneously opening up many more issues that must be resolved; McCutchen itself, as the Third Circuit’s opinion reflects, is the outcome of just that dynamic.

Nobody wants to be in the pension business anymore (other than, I guess, vendors who provide defined benefit plan services, annuities, etc. to plans and their sponsors). The Washington Post had an interesting article recently on the vanishing pension, and of course everyone who works in this field has long known that plan sponsors have been aggressively moving from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans for years. In fact, as I have discussed in other posts and address again in an upcoming feature article in the Journal of Pension Benefits, the most important aspect of the Supreme Court’s watershed decision a few years back in LaRue may very well not turn out to be the express grant to defined contribution plan participants of the right to sue for fiduciary breaches based only on harm to their own accounts, but the Court’s express recognition that the legal rules established over decades governing pension plans should not automatically be applied to defined contribution plans. All of this sturm und drang – and much more -is part and parcel of the death of the pension, at least in the private sector; economics are almost certain to eventually kill them in the public sector as well, given enough time.

But getting rid of pensions and out of the pension business, if you are the fiduciary of a pension plan, is not easy and not without legal risk, including of being sued for breach of fiduciary duty for taking that step. One of my favorite commentators on pension governance issues, Susan Mangiero, and ERISA litigator Nancy Ross provide an excellent overview of this point in this article on CFO.com. This subject has come up a lot recently in discussions with clients, potential clients, and other ERISA lawyers, and this article is a terrific introduction to the subject.
 

Here’s a neat special edition of the John Marshall Law Review, covering Supreme Court Jurisprudence in advance of an employee benefits symposium at the law school. Several of the articles in particular jump out at me as a practitioner as being right on point with key issues playing out in the courtroom; I think it is notable in this regard, and possibly causally related, that several of the authors are practicing lawyers who focus on ERISA litigation.

One article addresses fiduciary obligations with regards to holding employer stock in a plan, or what the rest of us commonly refer to, by shorthand, as the Moench presumption. As I discussed in this post, the courts are in the process of working out the application of these obligations and the presumption under the real time circumstances of actual cases. Another focuses on the development and application of equitable remedies after Amara, and one other speaks to the role of SPDs after Amara. The two are linked, in that the communications contained in SPDs are central to the prosecution of the types of equitable relief claims opened up by Amara. And finally, one other article addresses the restricted scope of remedies available to plan participants as a result of the Supreme Court’s historically narrow reading of ERISA remedies in conjunction with its historically broad reading of ERISA preemption. Interestingly, and as I have written elsewhere, the expansion of equitable remedies by means of surcharge and other types of relief recognized by the Court in Amara is likely to serve as a curative to that problem, by creating an avenue to use the equitable relief prong of ERISA to provide relief to participants in circumstances in which, previously, the combination of ERISA’s limited list of remedies with its broad preemptive effect would have precluded relief being granted to the participant.
 

I have written at different times about the likely expansion, as we move forward, of fiduciary liability in ERISA litigation, despite the existence of a number of decisions and doctrines – such as the Moench presumption and the numerous decisions applying it – that seem to pose significant barriers to such liability being imposed. I have argued that, over time, lawyers for participants will develop effective tactics to get around those types of barriers, and will become more astute in their analysis of plan conduct and fiduciary behavior, which will have the effect of expanding fiduciary liability. I have also written, both here and elsewhere, that fiduciary exposure is going to increase dramatically once participants become more effective at avoiding these types of legal barriers that tend to defeat claims at the motion stage, and are instead able to move their claims into the fact intensive stages of summary judgment practice and trial. This is because court decisions over the past few years are suggesting that, once courts look under the hood at the actual operation of plans, they tend to find problems sufficient to allow the imposition of fiduciary liability. It is important to understand, in this regard, that the long running trend, which may now be turning, in favor of fiduciaries in high-stakes ERISA class action litigation was based more on legal rulings at the motion to dismiss stage, than on fact intensive inquiries by courts. In the excessive fee cases, for instance, fiduciaries made out quite well when the cases never made it out of motion practice, but have not made out as well when such cases have been tried.

The same phenomenon may be occurring in stock drop litigation under ERISA, given United States District Court Judge Paul Crotty’s decision this week denying, for the most part, the defendants’ motions to dismiss in the Fannie Mae ERISA stock drop action, which concerned the overwhelming collapse in the stock price of company shares held in an ESOP, along with a corresponding massive collapse in the value of the assets of the ESOP. The Court applied the Moench presumption, and found that, on the facts pled by the plaintiffs, it did not bar the claims. In essence, the Court found that the detailed facts pled by the plaintiff went far beyond the simple collapse in stock price that past cases, applying the presumption, have found is insufficient to sustain a stock drop case of this nature, and instead was sufficient to overcome the presumption of prudence that would have otherwise attached to the defendants’ decision to continue to hold company stock in the ESOP. In this, you see plaintiffs who have learned the lessons of the stock drop litigation to date and who now understand how to sustain such claims past the motion to dismiss stage, despite the power of the Moench presumption. You also see something else in the Court’s decision, which is a recognition of the key role that the actual facts will and should play in a stock drop case in deciding whether or not fiduciary liability exists, in contrast to allowing the presumption itself to dictate the outcome at the motion stage. The Court found that the detailed knowledge of the defendants pled by the plaintiffs would, as opposed to the allegations in cases that have failed to overcome the Moench presumption, be sufficient to maintain the action and overcome the presumption, stating that “if [Fannie Mae’s] alleged situation . . . is not sufficiently ‘dire’ to state a claim, it is not clear what would be sufficient.”

You can find an excellent article on the ruling here, and the decision itself right here.
 

I like this piece here on the question of whether investment and financial advisors who foul up their initial efforts to comply with the fee disclosure regulations should be given a mulligan, and allowed to effectively self-report and correct without penalty. The proposal is to have the Department of Labor essentially run yet another type of voluntary correction procedure, which would then insulate advisors who have erred in complying with the new rules. While I am not in favor of a complete free pass for mistakes, certainly the middle ground on the idea staked out by one commentator, Craig Watanabe of California’s Penniall & Associates, who favors amnesty for honest mistakes but not for those that rise (or – I guess more accurately – fall) to the level of negligence, has merit.. Why? Because its not the easiest thing to implement and comply with a new regulatory regime of this nature, and it seems fair to allow the regulated a chance to fix early, honest mistakes that occur in trying to properly comply; the same can’t be said for efforts to comply that are so lax, so without real intent to satisfy the new rules, and so poorly executed that they should be deemed negligent. I would also note that, since the justification given for the idea is the difficulty of early compliance, that the amnesty program, if created, ought to vanish after a year or so. If someone cannot get it right by then, they shouldn’t be trusted with all of the other complexities involved in handling and protecting workers’ retirements.

This is a very entertaining and interesting piece from AON’s Mark Hermann, leaving aside any qualms about the seriousness of the website that published it. In it, Hermann makes the case for litigation counsel to provide overviews to their clients structured around the question of how they plan to win the case, rather than just by providing an overview of the case and its history. I will take his thought one step further, and argue that every single thing a litigator does on a case should be done with that in mind; that, in essence, every decision in a case and every step taken should be subject to a litmus test of whether it gets the client one step closer to winning the case. In many ways, that was the thesis of this article of mine, on patent infringement litigation, in which I discussed the difficulties of cost faced by smaller companies forced to litigate such cases. Having litigated a number of intellectual property cases – including trying a patent case – for smaller and emerging companies who were facing off against deeper pocketed rivals, I knew that the key to cost containment was to focus strategy, discovery, expert issues, and motion practice only on the pieces needed to win at trial or summary judgment, and to avoid the siren song of pursuing interesting but expensive and likely not important side issues in the case. As I explained in the article, costs could be controlled by focusing only on the themes and issues relevant to winning, rather than pursuing every possible thing that could, but probably would not, affect the outcome of the case.

This approach – which Hermann likens to focusing on the closing of a trial – can and should influence everything a trial lawyer does, from the reporting to the client that is the focus of Hermann’s piece to discovery strategy to motion practice, all the way up to trial. If it doesn’t matter to winning, or to preventing the other side from winning (to the extent the two concepts aren’t entirely co-extensive), than it is has no purpose in a case. Deposition practice, for instance, is a perfect example. Sure, there are instances in which a deposition is taken just to get background information and understand what actually occurred. For the most part, though, depositions involve witnesses who have a known role in the events at issue and in those instances, I almost never ask a question that doesn’t already fit my plan for one of three things: what I am going to prove to obtain summary judgment, what I am going to use to prevent the other side from obtaining summary judgment, or what I am going to prove at trial. When it comes to a deposition, if a lawyer cannot explain how a particular question or answer fits into one of those three rubrics, 90% of the time the question and its answer has no purpose in the case, and serves only to extend the length of depositions and the cost of discovery to clients.

You can carry Hermann’s concern across the entire length of a case, from beginning to end. And, as Hermann suggests and my article on patent infringement litigation focused on, you can use that concern to reduce legal costs and get better results, all at the same time.