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.
 

This is an interesting story on a number of levels. The article tells the tale of the Department of Labor suing the fiduciaries of an ESOP for failing to properly scrutinize and challenge an appraiser’s report valuing company stock, which was used to support the price paid by the plan for company stock. The article illustrates a significant problem in ESOPs that hold private company stock, which is the need to have appraisers set the price of the stock for purposes of the ESOP’s operations. This becomes a closed circle in valuation, consisting of the plan fiduciaries and the appraiser; no one else really plays a role or is involved. This absence of sunlight creates an environment in which, if the plan and/or the fiduciaries have a motivation to do so, the valuation of the ESOP holdings – i.e., of the portion of the company owned by the employees – can be distorted. Even in the absence of a motivation to do so, this closed process, in which there is no competing public market valuing the holdings or other outside check on the valuation, can result in a distorted valuation out of sheer error. The only check on that potential problem are the fiduciary obligations of the ESOP’s fiduciaries, and the enforcement tools, whether of the DOL or participants, provided by breach of fiduciary duty litigation, which allows participants and/or the DOL to pursue fiduciaries for problems that crop up in this process.

One of the most important takeaways from the article, as well as from my own experience in ESOP litigation, is the fact that the fiduciaries of ESOP plans should not assume they can simply obtain a valuation, treat it is correct, rely on it, and be safe from potential personal liability for a fiduciary breach. As the article points out, the fiduciaries, even when they rely on an appraisal report, can violate their fiduciary obligations, and be liable for doing so, if they do not properly analyze and vet the appraisal. ESOP plan fiduciaries should not simply receive an appraisal, use the numbers in it to run the plan, and put the report in a drawer; they need to analyze it, quiz the appraiser, and test its numbers. Only these later steps – and only when done well – will give those fiduciaries any real protection from breach of fiduciary duty litigation involving the valuation of ESOP assets.
 

An upcoming article of mine in the Journal of Pension Benefits argues that ERISA litigation and potential exposures are moving away from strict constructionism and technical legal arguments to fact based inquiries into potential harms to participants, and traces how we came to that place. This is a more significant change than it may appear to any of you who do not spend your time litigating ERISA disputes. This shift is going to make ERISA litigation more like other litigation, with a focus on factual development and discovery, and less on doctrinal argument. The Seventh Circuit’s recent ruling in George v. Junior Achievement of Central Indiana, Inc., discussed in this excellent synopsis here, is a perfect example of this phenomenon, with the Court rejecting a technical, statutory basis for rejecting a retaliation claim under ERISA in favor of a broader reading of the relevant statutory language, one that can allow for a fact-based inquiry into whether or not the participant actually was retaliated against. You can expect more and more of this kind of shift in the future, across the range of issues impacting ERISA plans, particularly with regard to retirement benefits, whether provided under defined contribution or instead defined benefit plans.

Here’s an interesting juxtaposition of two stories from over the weekend (if you consider a Monday morning story about football over the weekend to qualify temporally), the first this one from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the massive underfunding of state public employee pensions. If these were private pensions, the fiduciaries of the plans would have been under much more pressure to avoid falling into this level of a sinkhole. Forget the Department of Labor, the IRS and the PBGC, and focus just on the extent to which this scenario would be soundly characterized as a failure of fiduciary prudence, putting the fiduciaries at risk of personal liability. I have said it before and I am sure I will say it again after today, but the private attorney general nature of ERISA litigation, with its attendant potential personal liability of fiduciaries charged with making decisions for a plan, creates powerful incentives to not screw up as badly as those running public pension plans have over the past few years.

The real solution to this mess going forward (although it won’t clean up the massive underfunding to date)  will likely be moving public employees towards a defined contribution type system, rather than a defined benefit system, with a boost in pay that allows them to make appropriate retirement investments. This isn’t so much a solution targeted at a problem with the employees themselves, but rather at the tendency of the managers of these plans to overpromise pension benefits in contract negotiations and under-deliver by pushing the costs of those benefits off into the future as liabilities of the taxpayers. A move to a defined contribution system would push the costs into the present, requiring that the retirement costs be paid out during the employee’s work life.

And in this story about locked out NFL referees, who are fighting with the NFL over the league’s attempt to move them from a pension plan to a 401(k) plan, you see the underlying problem. As Peter King wrote in an on-line column today on Sports Illustrated:

Many of you think for 120 part-time officials to get an average of $38,250 per year in pension contributions is excessive. But the regular officials are simply trying to keep a benefit they’ve had for the last several years. The league contributed $5.3 million to officials’ pensions last year and propose to contribute $2 million this year; the cut, the league says, is in keeping with pension plans around the country going to a 401k pension plan, subject to the whims of the stock market, rather than guaranteeing retirees a fixed return on their investments. What’s $3 million to the NFL? That’s only partially the point. The league has made many full-time employees take the lesser pension, so how can they give part-timers a better deal?

But here’s the thing about the NFL’s complaint that they have moved their other, full-time employees to defined contribution plans, and that there is no reason for the referees to not be moved as well. The difference is that the referees, unlike most of the full-time NFL employees who have been transitioned to defined contribution plans – and indeed unlike almost every private sector employee who has been forced to give up a pension in this way – don’t need the job, have other economic resources beyond just their work for the employer (in this instance the NFL) seeking to end their pensions, and have a vigorous union. They, unlike the other NFL employees who have already suffered this fate, are in a position to fight that change, and they are and will do that. No employee in America has willingly accepted this change, but the referees are some of the few in a position to fight back against it. That is what makes them different than the other NFL employees who have given up their pensions, and why the league’s argument that the referees should be treated like all other NFL employees in this regard is pure sophistry; if the other employees had been in a position to fight it, like the referees, they would have done so too.

And this, oddly enough, circles us right back around to the problem with municipal and state pensions. These are highly unionized employees who have the political power to fight back against efforts to eliminate pensions, and as such are some of the few employees left in this country who both have a pension and have the ability to push back against changes to their pensions. This sentence could just as easily describe the NFL’s referees.

There are many lessons that one can draw from the juxtaposition of these two stories, and I will leave you free to draw your own. I already know what mine are.
 

Tidal Wave! Landslide! Look out below!

Pick out the metaphor of your choice, because Unum just got taken out behind the woodshed by the Ninth Circuit and spanked hard. Frankly, the Ninth Circuit’s opinion is a rout in favor of the participant, and participants in general. In many ways, the case presented a perfect storm for such an overwhelming opinion against a long term disability carrier. The case involved: a very sympathetic plaintiff who suffered a horrible, fluke injury that most readers could sympathize with; a lot of money; and a long term disability carrier with a documented history of claim disputes that the court could point to in further support of its ruling. I have to tell you that the facts painted by the Ninth Circuit in this opinion, related to both the claim and the carrier, are clearly of an outlier event, one not representative of the handling of most claims by most long term disability carriers, or of most long term disability carriers at all, for that matter. Twenty years of experience tell me most attorneys representing participants would, even if only off the record, agree with that assessment.

Frankly, despite Unum’s own documented history with regard to claims handling, cited by the Ninth Circuit to support its opinion, I am not sure that the depiction of the carrier in this opinion is even representative of that carrier at this point in time, but I don’t know enough to comment knowingly in that regard.

More importantly though, and moving away from the overflowing kettle of clichés with which I deliberately chose to fill the first couple paragraphs of this post, it would be a shame if courts, participants, companies and their lawyers allowed the unusual nature of the case to become the focus of their attention. This is because there are several key takeaways from this case, some specific to long term disability cases and others, even more important, to ERISA litigation in general.

With regard to these types of benefit claims, one should look closely at the Court’s handling of the structural conflict of interest issue. The Court not only points toward significant discovery and even a possible bench trial over this issue, but also demonstrates how to use the contents of an administrative record in support of proving the impact of such a conflict. This is all strong stuff, and for many who thought the Supreme Court’s structural conflict of interest ruling in Glenn opened up a Pandora’s box or put us all on a slippery slope towards ever expansive, and more expensive, benefits litigation, here is the proof for that hypothesis.

To me, the most worrisome aspect of the decision, and one that sponsors and companies need to pay very careful attention to in terms of planning their benefit operations and obtaining legal services, is the Court’s very broad application of the fiduciary exception to the attorney-client privilege. The issue here isn’t so much the conclusion that the exception makes internal legal discussions related to a claim subject to disclosure, but the line drawing it demonstrates with regard to when legal advice is, and is not, subject to disclosure. In short, plan administration – including benefit determination issues – are subject to disclosure and not protected. At the same time, though, what is protected is advice related to the protection of fiduciaries against personal liability, civil or criminal, when that advice is clearly distinct from the handling of claims under a plan and the administration of a plan.

Now the interesting thing about that distinction is that, as anyone who litigates breach of fiduciary duty or other ERISA cases knows, there is clearly some overlap between the two types of legal advice and there is not always a clear separation between the two. Certainly a fiduciary sued for misconduct is being sued because of events involving a claim and a plan’s administration, and thus legal advice rendered to the fiduciary falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. Further complicating this issue is a fact that the Ninth Circuit points out, which is that plan sponsors and plan fiduciaries often rely on the same lawyers and law firm for advice on all aspects of their plans, from formation to termination and everything in between, including the handling of claims and the representation of officers sued as fiduciaries.

In that latter instance of breach of fiduciary duty litigation against officers, it is crucially important for numerous reasons, as every litigator knows, to have a safe, secure and fully privileged attorney-client relationship. The standards enunciated by the Ninth Circuit, however, place that privilege at some risk in instances in which the same firm that has represented the plan in general is also representing fiduciaries or other company officers with regard to their personal potential liability. The best answer, for numerous reasons, to protecting those fiduciaries and officers, and maintaining the attorney-client privilege that is crucial to their protection, is going to be separating out the representation of such individuals from the routine legal work related to the plan’s formation, operation, administration and claims handling, and using independent, distinct counsel for the representation of such individuals. By segregating out and using separate, independent counsel for any issues related to their potential exposures, you make clear that the legal advice at issue involves privileged issues concerning the potential liability of officers and fiduciaries, which should still be privileged after the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, and is not intermingled with or otherwise part of the broad range of legal services typically required by a plan, which the Ninth Circuit’s opinion holds is likely to be subject to disclosure.

In short, the pragmatic solution is to continue to use one firm for the overall handling of a plan’s various needs, but separate, independent counsel for any and all needs – whether involving litigation or only the potential risk of litigation or exposure – of a plan’s fiduciaries or the officers of the company sponsoring the plan.

That’s my two cents for now. The case is Stephan v. Unum, and you can find it here.
 

Here is a great fact pattern that illustrates a number of recurring problems in ERISA litigation. In this case (Tocker v. Kraft Foods North America, Inc. Retirement Plan), decided by the Second Circuit last week, a mid-level benefits manager worked on accommodating the needs of a terminally ill plan participant, by working out an arrangement by which the participant could first receive long term disability benefits and then receive workforce reduction payments, rather than having to choose one or the other. Naturally, of course, since it turned into litigation, the arrangement did not work out without a hiccup, as it affected the participant’s pension credits. The participant sought to remedy that problem by use of a breach of fiduciary duty claim. The breach of fiduciary duty claim failed, however, because the benefits manager was found to have only been engaged in ministerial duties, and not fiduciary duties, and thus a breach of fiduciary duty action was not viable.

The case nicely illustrates and establishes the dividing line between fiduciary and non-fiduciary acts by executives of a company involved in running a company’s benefit plan, and the opinion’s first and best use will be in cases where that point must be established, particularly cases where one side or the other needs to prove that someone was, or was not, a fiduciary for purposes of a particular dispute. The decision is particularly on point with regard to the question of when does the provision of information about benefits render someone a fiduciary (the answer according to this decision is, effectively, never, although I am engaged in a purposeful bit of overstatement there).

However, it also illustrates a point I discuss in detail in an upcoming article in the Journal of Pension Benefits, which is the difficulty, under ERISA, of redressing problems in plan administration that are not merely denials of benefits clearly owed under a plan (and thus can be remedied under the denial of benefits prong of ERISA) and cannot be shown to involve fiduciary conduct. The dispute at issue in Tocker was exactly that type, and the plaintiff, despite having possibly been harmed by an operational misstep in implementing the agreed upon arrangement to coordinate the participant’s disability benefits and workforce reduction award, was unable to construct a viable cause of action under ERISA to address that problem and possible loss. The statute’s remedial rigidity had long been a problem in ERISA litigation over the years, impacting the ability of participants to address these types of problems. As I discuss in my upcoming article, this problem has likely been solved by the surcharge remedy recognized by the Supreme Court in its recent decision in Cigna v. Amara: the best approach open to the plaintiff in Tocker today would have been to structure his claim as one for equitable relief based on the surcharge remedy, rather than as a breach of fiduciary duty claim. When his case began, though, well before the decision in Amara, this option would not have been open to him.