Here’s a handy-dandy, one shot, easily referenced statement of the law in the First Circuit governing the statute of limitations applicable to LTD claims, and thus, by extension, all denial of benefit claims. It comes from the First Circuit’s decision last week in Santaliz-Rios v. Metropolitan Life Insurance:

Congress has not established a limitations period for ERISA claims brought pursuant to 29 U.S.C. § 1132(a)(1)(B). Island View Residential Treatment Ctr. v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mass., Inc., 548 F.3d 24, 27 (1st Cir.2008). Therefore, in adjudicating ERISA claims, federal courts borrow the most closely analogous statute of limitations in the forum state. Id. (citing Edes v. Verizon Commc’n, Inc., 417 F.3d 133, 138 (1st Cir.2005)). In Puerto Rico, the default limitations period applicable to contract claims is fifteen years. P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 31, § 5294; Caribbean Mushroom Co. v. Gov’t Dev. Bank for P.R., 102 F.3d 1307, 1312 (1st Cir.1996) (“[C]ontract claims that are covered by the Commerce Code but are not designated for special prescriptive treatment automatically fall under the Civil Code’s fifteen-year catch-all provision.”). This period has been applied to ERISA claims where no alternative limitations period was agreed upon by the parties. See Nazario Martinez v. Johnson & Johnson Baby Prods. ., Inc., 184 F.Supp.2d 157, 159–62 (D.P.R.2002).

However, where the contract at issue itself provides a shorter limitations period, that period will govern as long as it is reasonable. See Island View, 548 F.3d at 27 (applying a contractually agreed-upon limitations period to ERISA claim); Rios–Coriano v. Hartford Life & Accident Ins. Co., 642 F.Supp.2d 80, 83 (D.P.R.2009) (“Choosing which state statute to borrow is unnecessary, however, where the parties have contractually agreed upon a limitations period, provided the limitations period is reasonable.”)

The plaintiff was barred by the contractual limitations period, as the court gave little weight to the plaintiff’s attempts to argue around the contractual limitations period, which were basically limited to tolling arguments made, apparently, without significant factual support. Attacks on statute of limitations bars need to be well-grounded in factual support to have any traction in this circuit, in my view, and that clearly didn’t occur in this instance. I can picture fact patterns involving contractual limitations periods, however, that could more readily sustain an assault on their application.
 

I often think of the story of the cobbler’s kids having no shoes when I read about problems in a law firm’s benefit plan; lawyers spend their time fixing other people’s business problems, often to the exclusion of paying attention to their own business issues. Festering problems in a law firm’s 401(k) or other benefit plans fit this rubric well. This story, about a small Philadelphia law firm sued by the Department of Labor for operational problems in its 401(k) plan, illustrates the point nicely. As the story makes clear, the law firm does not seem to have engaged in any nefarious conduct, but to instead have dropped the ball on various technical, operational aspects of running a defined contribution plan, such as segregation of assets, timing of deposits, and the like. I have represented smaller and mid-sized law firms in disputes over their defined contribution plans, and I can tell you that, as this story likewise reflects, smaller law firms face the same burdens and problems in running profit sharing and 401(k) plans as do most other mid-sized and small businesses: the technicalities, the time demands and the complexity of doing it correctly are often beyond their internal capacities, and certainly outside of their core competencies. I have preached many times that the key to not getting sued, whether by the Department of Labor or plan participants, is an obsessive focus on compliance in plan operations; for many smaller businesses, as this story about the Philadelphia law firm reflects, this can only be accomplished by outsourcing to a competent vendor.

It is actually amazing, if you really step back and think it through, the amount of energy and analysis that goes into the question of determining who is, and who is not, a fiduciary under ERISA in various scenarios. There is a reason for this, though, and it is that acquiring – or being assigned – the status of fiduciary when the assets or operations of an ERISA governed plan are at issue can be highly fact dependent, and someone who is a fiduciary in one context may not be one in another. The Department of Labor has tried, through rulemaking, to simultaneously expand and make more consistent who is a fiduciary and when, a project I have expressed some doubts about both in speaking engagements and in a recent article in the Journal of Pension benefits. The issue becomes even more complicated, though, if and when you try to coordinate that issue under ERISA with similar, but not identical, obligations imposed by the SEC, a point addressed in detail in this article here, which emphasizes that the different roles and obligations of advisors and consultants operating in one sphere as opposed to those operating in the other argue against trying to create one consistent, overriding fiduciary definition applicable in both spheres. As a wit once noted, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I am not sure that isn’t the case here: rather than trying to shoehorn two different regulatory and legal regimes into one supposedly consistent fiduciary definition, it may make at least as much sense to allow different fiduciary standards to apply to different statutory bodies of law.

I used to be a fan, back in the old days when The New Republic was actually meaningful and influential, of its zeitgeist table, as it really did, in a glance, sum up what people were thinking and talking about, albeit in a humorous way. I couldn’t help but think of that this morning when I read Chris Carosa’s “FiduciaryNews Trending Topics for ERISA Plan Sponsors: Week Ending 7/27/12.” Its like a college survey course on one page of what everyone in the retirement industry either is or should be thinking about right now, from the costs of plans to fee disclosure to the coming tax wallop you are going to suffer to fix the public pension system to the misinformation, non-disclosure and outright confusion rampant in the knowledge base of plan sponsors and participants.

Looks like everybody knows a good story when they see it. Here’s a nice CCH piece on the same Sixth Circuit decision I discussed in my last post, concerning the fiduciary status of a depository institution under ERISA.

Interestingly, the whole deconstructionist/critical legal studies movement (I know I am dating myself by at least decades here by this reference; what’s next for me, a link to an article about Bruce Springsteen, or the 1980 Olympics?) had at its heart the idea that if you trace back a thought to its earliest formulation you can learn a lot about how the current conception came to be, and whether the current conception should be accepted at face value. I bring this up because I have done enough work on the fiduciary status of commercial banks to know the judicial history of the assumption – and of the case law to the effect – that they should not normally qualify as fiduciaries for purposes of ERISA. If you trace the history back far enough, you find that what is, in essence, a prevailing presumption against finding such entities to be functional fiduciaries isn’t all that well-founded.
 

All right now, its time to get back up on the horse – the blogging horse, that is. I didn’t actually go on vacation for the last month, believe it or not – I had a major brief concerning a piercing the corporate veil case against a corporate officer due not long after the July 4th holiday, followed almost immediately by briefing concerning the First Amendment rights of internet posters. Fun stuff, but it hasn’t left much, if any, time for blogging.

So I am now going to try to catch up on a number of items that I spotted – but was never able to find the time to post on – over the past month. I am going to start today with this story right here, about the Sixth Circuit ruling that ERISA claims against a bank failed on the ground that the bank did not qualify as a fiduciary, while the state law claims against the bank could not go forward because they were preempted.

Speaking last month at an MCLE seminar on the subject of litigating top-hat and other compensation disputes, I discussed one of my favorite conceptual points, which is the theoretical possibility in certain cases of prevailing, as a defendant, by showing that the ERISA claims fail on technical grounds while state law claims are preempted at the same time because the underlying fact pattern – whether or not capable of supporting successful claims under ERISA– turn on the terms of an ERISA governed plan. The end result is that a plaintiff would not be able to recover at all – or even have any viable causes of action – against the defendant. I discussed it, in fact, right here in this PowerPoint slide in my presentation, which referenced a case, Aubuchon v. Benefirst, in which I pursued that defense strategy. As my fellow panelists at the seminar and I discussed, it is a conceptually elegant and perfectly logical argument, but one that courts generally don’t like, finding that, much as the dissent did in the Sixth Circuit case referenced in the article, the circumstances either cannot or should not be interpreted in a manner that would leave the plaintiff with no viable cause of action under ERISA itself while simultaneously eliminating any state law rights by operation of preemption.

Here, though, the Sixth Circuit accepted that argument and found the plaintiff to have no viable claims, for this reason, against a defendant. It is interesting to note, though, that the defendant who benefited from that here is a bank. For whatever reason, banks – traditional, old-fashioned depository/lending institution type banks – make out very well in ERISA litigation when a party tries to bring them in, as happened in this case, as a functional or deemed fiduciary, based on the bank’s role in handling and distributing a plan asset; there is a long history of cases, although perhaps relatively few in number, placing such an institution outside of the role of fiduciary for purposes of ERISA litigation, when the bank is serving in a traditional banking role as a depository or lending institution. Add in the impact of preemption, and a bank that is merely holding the plan assets or lending against them (or supposedly only doing that, as the facts alleged in the case before the Sixth Circuit, as is often true in similar cases, could be construed as involving much more than that on the part of the bank in question) is in a very privileged position when it comes to defending litigation over its involvement with an ERISA governed plan.

The decision is McLemore v. EFS, and you can find it here.
 

This is a very fun – if you can use that word for insurance disputes – discussion of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court determining what trigger applies under insurance policies issued to insureds sued for asbestos related injuries. Its partly fun because it replays a highly contentious and, for all involved, expensive chapter in American legal history, namely the decade or so long battle in the United States courts to decide which insurance policies were triggered by – and thus had to cover – injuries caused by asbestos exposure. The courts here struggled for many years to decide which of many possible triggers apply, including: a continuous or multiple trigger which found coverage under all policies in effect from the time the worker was exposed to asbestos through the incubation period in the worker to the time the worker’s illness actually came to exist; an exposure trigger, making policies in effect when the worker was exposed to asbestos applicable; a manifestation trigger, under which policies in effect when the asbestos related disease manifested itself apply; and an injury-in- fact trigger, under which the policies apply that were in effect when a worker, previously exposed to asbestos years before, actually suffered injury from the exposure. Because of the diverse American legal system, with its numerous federal circuits and 50 state court systems, no one, single rule was ever settled upon as universally applicable. It appears in the UK, though, they are settling on one single rule, at least according to the article.

Some of you, particularly those of you who have heard me speak over the years, are familiar with my view that modern American insurance law, for all intents and purposes, springs out of the trigger of coverage and other disputes from the early 1980s concerning coverage for asbestos related losses, and in particular out of the D.C. federal court’s adoption of the multiple trigger standard for applying general liability policies to asbestos losses; in part, these events became the touchstone for coverage disputes to come because of the ease with which court decisions on these issues could, by analogy, be extended to other types of long tail exposures, such as environmental losses and other types of toxic torts, in which – as with asbestos – the event that would eventually cause injury (whether to person or property) happens years before either injury occurs or is learned of. In my view, before then, insurance law had changed little (speaking broadly) for generations. After the explosion in coverage litigation over asbestos, close textual analysis of key terms in insuring agreements, policy definitions and exclusions became crucially important and widespread, far more than it was before these watershed events; indeed, some of the methodology applied by courts at that time and the decisions they made in interpreting policy terms still reverberate in coverage decisions today. Many issues and developments in the insurance industry and the law of insurance coverage can be traced back to these events, from the expansion in use of the claims made policy form to the existence of significant, always on-call insurance coverage practice groups representing policyholders.

A few months ago, I spoke on the subject of cyberinsurance before a large insurance industry group, and the organizing principle of my talk was the idea that the evolution of coverage forms and coverage litigation involving insurance for cyber exposures was mimicking, and would continue to mimic, the industry’s past experience with both asbestos and – in terms both of temporal proximity and legal analysis – its close cousin, environmental exposures. The reality is that, while past performance may not guarantee future results, the development of new insurance coverage exposures as well as of policy forms to deal with them always harken back at this point to the legal and industry developments of 30 years ago that arose out of asbestos and environmental exposures, but almost never, interestingly enough, to legal and industry developments that predate that.
 

Is there a more hot button topic in the world, just as a general principle, than compensation, especially of the executive kind? From Salary.com to the outrage of politicians over financial industry pay, the subject is never far from your internet browser. In fact, just for amusement’s sake, I just googled executive compensation, and the first page of results had no less than three links claiming to tell me what executives throughout the country earn.

Of more interest to me professionally than what executives earn, though, is what happens when they end up litigating disputes with their employers over their compensation. ERISA often gets dragged into such disputes, although there are an increasing number of judicial decisions – though still few – questioning whether individual agreements with executives to set compensation should fall within ERISA, rather than being handled as pure breach of contract cases under state law. The forum, venue, nature of defenses, potential damages, and strategy in such disputes can all be greatly affected by whether the dispute should be governed by ERISA or is instead simply an old fashioned state law dispute.

I will be talking about this and more next week when I address the details of litigating executive compensation disputes in this MCLE seminar. Two other excellent speakers, Marcia Wagner and Philip Gordon, will be discussing various aspects of crafting and negotiating executive compensation agreements – I will then weigh in on what happens when that work, as it sometimes does, leads to the parties suing each other.

You can find registration information for the seminar itself and for the webcast here.
 

This is an interesting story on a number of levels, about the GM pension plan, its size, GM’s efforts to reduce the size of its liabilities, and the company’s decision to transfer administration and future costs to a certain extent to a large insurer. GM and its pension plan have continued to be one of the few public stories of a well-run pension plan that has largely stayed out of trouble and largely – at least from public view – maintained the company’s retirement compact with its salaried, non-union employees. That hasn’t stopped, however, the size, cost and complexity of the pension plan from impacting and taking attention away from GM’s actual reason for existing, which is to compete successfully as a car company. It is also worth noting how few well-run, well-regarded large private pension plans continue to exist out there. The combination of all three of these things – the rarity of such an example, the impact on a company of continuing to be such an example, and the desire of that example to get the heck out of the pension business – is as good a death knell for the private pension system as you can find.

Here’s a very nice piece on fee disclosure, as mandated by the Department of Labor, and the idea that it is to everyone’s benefit. I have long maintained that fee disclosure of the type at issue falls squarely in the ballpark of the old saying that sunshine is the best disinfectant, and that running from fee disclosure – whether as a plan sponsor or a service provider – is the intellectual equivalent of running from the bogeyman; there is, in fact, nothing to fear from it, for well-run plans and above-board advisors, and for those who aren’t yet those but aspire to be.

Why is that? Well, let’s run through the list of players in the 401(k) rubric. Plan participants obviously benefit from knowing what their funds costs, and from the opportunity to use that information to demand proper attention to fees from their plan’s sponsors, administrators and fiduciaries. Where is the downside to them? I can’t see one. And then there are plan fiduciaries. Plan fiduciaries should be avoiding fees that are higher than needed, both to protect themselves from fiduciary liability and to best serve participants. Now this doesn’t mean they are required to, and nothing in fee disclosure or the law governing fees requires them to, chase the lowest possible cost investment options. What it does mean, though, and which cases like Tibble make clear, is that they have to investigate and follow a prudent process directed at using the right investment option at the right price. The more information they have, the better they are able to do this; likewise, the more they are pressed by participants to do this, the more likely they are to install a good process to review these aspects of their plans and, correspondingly, the less likely they are to fall below their fiduciary duties in this regard. This all make them less likely to be sued for, or found liable for, excessive fee claims, and thus protects them from financial risk in running the plan. These outcomes flow naturally from the public disclosure of the fees inherent in a plan. And finally there are the investment advisors and other service providers. More than one such provider has told me that they already make this information available or have changed their business models to build around the open disclosure of this information, and that they believe their ability to compete both on transparency of and attention to controlling expenses is a competitive advantage for them. I have long believed that transparency works to the business advantage of the best players in this area, and aren’t those the ones who should be winning business? Just another side benefit of fee disclosure, and one more reason why, when it comes to fee disclosure, there is, to quote a former president who knew a thing or two about creating a retirement plan, nothing to fear but fear itself.