Not unexpectedly, the Second Circuit has just adopted the Moench presumption, in this ruling here and this one here involving stock drop cases. For those with less time on your hands, here is an excellent news media summary of these stock drop rulings out of the Second Circuit yesterday. I have long posited that, given the trend in the case law, such an adoption of this approach by the Second Circuit would essentially spell the death knell for this theory of liability; I have essentially always been of the view that, should the Second Circuit apply the Moench presumption approach to these types of cases, the stock drop theory vanishes. It’s a strange legal structure, in a way, that an area of plan management involving vast sums of employee wealth can essentially be subject to no court oversight whatsoever, even to the minimal extent of the actions getting past the motion stage and into a court review of whether, on the actual facts, the fiduciaries’ conduct was prudent, simply because the company wasn’t on the precipice of outright collapse (which is the layman’s language version of what the Moench presumption requires for a stock drop case to get past the motion to dismiss stage). Now, this isn’t the same as saying the outcome at the end of the day in stock drop cases should be different, and that the fiduciaries shouldn’t walk under these fact patterns; it may well be a fair statement, given the ups and downs of the market and the potentially conflicting duties imposed by the securities laws, that the exact conduct made not actionable at the pleading stage by means of the Moench presumption should also pass muster on their actual facts after a review of whether the behavior was prudent under all the circumstances. But the Moench presumption is essentially a get out of jail free card that insulates the conduct without such review, simply on the basis that the plaintiffs cannot plead that the company was in near fatal financial distress; as a result, the propriety or lack thereof of holding employer stock in the stock drop scenario becomes free of any review – and of the healthy discipline imposed by the risk of court review – under pretty much all other circumstances. That’s a weird little outcome, really, if you think about it. It essentially consists of the courts making a decision to divest themselves of any jurisdiction to oversee the propriety of fiduciary conduct in the circumstances presented by stock drop cases.

So half the parties interpreting a possibly ambiguous plan term that is subject to discretionary review come out one way in reading the term, and the other two the other way. Who wins? Well, this is a trick question to some extent, because it doesn’t matter the numbers – all that matters is who gets the last say. This means, of course, that the side who wins that split is whichever one the appeals court agrees with.

And that is a roundabout lead in to this story here – from Michael Rigney’s excellent blog on Seventh Circuit appeals – that crossed my desk, about a Seventh Circuit opinion in September concerning the interpretation of the offset provisions in a pension plan where the plan terms invested the administrator with discretionary authority; in that case, the appellate bench concluded that the administrator’s interpretation was reasonable enough to pass muster and thus controlled the question.

More than the outcome, though, what I liked about the case was the panel’s explanation of the law of plan interpretation under ERISA, which was described as:

As a general rule, “federal common law principles of contract interpretation govern” the interpretation of ERISA plans. Swaback v. Am. Info. Techs. Corp., 103 F.3d 535, 540 (7th Cir. 1996). In this context, we have said that the fiduciary, in interpreting the plan, is not free, by virtue of its discretion, “to disregard unambiguous language in the plan.” Marrs v. Motorola, Inc., 577 F.3d 783, 786 (7th Cir. 2009); Swaback, 103 F.3d at 540. On the other hand, the fiduciary’s “use of interpretive tools to disambiguate ambiguous language is . . . entitled to deferential consideration by a reviewing court.” Marrs, 577 F.3d at 786 (emphasis omitted). In using such tools, the fiduciary may not, of course, rewrite or modify the plan. See Ross v. Indiana State Teacher’s Ass’n Ins. Trust, 159 F.3d 1001,12 No. 10-1900 1011 (7th Cir. 1998). “Interpretation and modification are different; the power to do the first does not imply the power to do the second.” Cozzie v. Metro. Life Ins. Co., 140 F.3d 1104, 1108 (7th Cir. 1998). Rather, the fiduciary must reach an interpretation compatible with the language and the structure of the plan document. Of course, “it is not our function to decide whether we would reach the same conclusion as the administrator.” Sisto v. Ameritech Sickness & Accident Disability Benefit Plan, 429 F.3d 698, 701 (7th Cir. 2005) (internal quotation marks omitted)

A handy synopsis of the issue, ready at a moment’s notice to be inserted in the beginning of a brief on the issue.

The case, by the way, is Frye v. Thompson Steel Company.
 

Well, I don’t know. Could privately run pension plans get away with this type of planning, or would they be running smack dab into breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits? I doubt a fiduciary could get away with pie in the sky projections intended to support current pension math, and I wouldn’t want to be the fiduciary who, like one of the people quoted in the article, accepted a consultant’s report justifying the math without having "looked under the hood of the analysis.” That’s a good quote to have waived in your face at a deposition or, worse yet, on the stand in a courtroom. On the other hand, the comments of one public pension fund executive could be used as the starting point for a seminar on good governance or what I call defensive plan building:

"It doesn’t matter what your assumptions are," said Laurie Hacking, executive director of the Teachers Retirement Association of Minnesota, which supports sticking with its 8.5% target return assumption. "It is what that market delivers that matters and how you react to that."

Ms. Hacking said Minnesota reacted to big investment losses after the financial crisis by cutting back on pension benefits and increasing contributions to the fund from employees and school districts. Those moves had a greater impact on the funding level of the teachers’ system, now a relatively healthy 78%, than lowering return assumptions, she said.

Comparing the two examples creates sort of a koan for fiduciaries of any plan: be the latter, not the former.
 

One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was about insurance coverage and the concept of the repeat player. The idea behind it was that insurers use the same counsel over and over again in coverage disputes, with the result that they put on the field – to use a sports metaphor – counsel who have a great deal of experience with the specific policy provisions at issue and a deep reservoir of knowledge about the effect of different fact patterns on the application of those provisions; the post pointed out that insureds are therefore not well served by using their general outside lawyers to represent them in such disputes, but are instead better served by finding their own “repeat players” to represent them in such cases, who can match the other side’s lawyers in expertise on and familiarity with the insurance policy types, terms and principles at issue.

The same holds true in ERISA litigation, particularly in the realm of denied benefit claims, whether they be short term or long term disability claims, health insurance, 401k issues, pension disputes, employee life insurance or other types of benefits made available by employers. Under ERISA, such benefits are governed by the terms of the plans under which they are provided, and litigation over any of them is subject to certain rules that are consistent across the field, such as those concerning the standard of review, the impact of conflicts of interest on the part of the administrator of the benefit plan, the contents of the administrative record, exhaustion of administrative remedies, regulations governing claims handling, and the scope of discovery. Most plan sponsors and administrators use “repeat players” to represent them on denial of benefit claims, to such an extent that some obtain discounted pricing in exchange for using the same counsel over and over again. This is actually beneficial to all involved on the defense side of such cases, as it creates a dynamic not just of cost savings for the plans, but also of the development of the level of expertise that comes through regular handling of the same type of cases, in this instance denied benefit claims under ERISA; this manner of developing expertise through repetition is exactly what is meant to be captured by the short-hand phrase “repeat player,” and this type of a consistent, mutually beneficial relationship between plans or administrators and their lawyers on such cases is how that expertise gets developed and brought to bear.

Interestingly, one should note that there is nothing unique to the defense side when it comes to the benefit of using a “repeat player” in denial of benefit claims under ERISA. You will have to trust me when I tell you that I routinely see the difference when, on the other side of the “v.” from me, is a lawyer who regularly represents plan participants in such disputes, as opposed to a general practice lawyer who represents plan participants only occasionally. This area of the law, like many others, is one where plaintiffs – who unlike the defendants may rarely be involved in such cases – also benefit from retaining a “repeat player.”

Mark Herrmann, the Chief Counsel for litigation at Aon, the insurance brokerage, wrote – whether he meant to or not – of this phenomenon in his piece the other day for Above the Law on “flotsam and jetsam,” in which he discussed the benefits to in-house legal departments of identifying areas of legal work that a company can bundle up and turn over, en masse, to an outside lawyer, who will handle the entire line of work for a fixed, and reduced, yearly retainer. I have over the years met with in-house benefit people and made the same suggestion with regard to a company’s handling of benefit claims, explaining that they are perfect for assigning to one counsel in exchange for a fixed fee payment structure for several reasons, including: (1) they are predictable in terms of time and cost investment, partly because discovery is limited; (2) the exposure to the company is narrow and predictable, because of the limited remedies available under ERISA and the ability to quantify the benefit amounts at issue under the relevant plan terms; and (3) the legal principles are consistent and should be well-known to defense counsel. This combination of predictability of the case with the expertise of the “repeat player” makes benefit claims perfectly suited to being bundled up in their totality and assigned to one outside counsel for a long period in exchange for cost savings to the company assigning the work.

Now as I noted, I have broached this idea over the years with plan sponsors and administrators, but I have to say I have never explained the concept quite as well as Mark Hermann did in his story. Writing as an in-house lawyer, he does a better job, I think, of isolating and describing the benefit to businesses in taking this approach than I have been able to do as an outside lawyer who can do no more than look through the window at the pressures, demands and needs of client companies. If you are in the benefits business, though, when you read his piece on it, think for a moment about how perfectly his description of “selling off” these types of cases fits the environment in which companies handle denial of benefit claims under their company benefit plans, and how well his idea would work for those types of claims.
 

Well, well, well. Here is the story – well-presented by two lawyers from Williams Mullen – of the Seventh Circuit deciding this month, in the case of Loomis v Exelon Corporation, that holding retail class mutual fund shares, rather than cheaper institutional share classes, in a defined contribution plan was not sufficient to establish fiduciary liability. Here is the decision itself.

Reading them together raises more than a few thoughts about the decision and the Court’s reasoning. I wanted to focus today on one particular point, which is that, as the authors of the article point out, the Seventh Circuit, in the opinion, continues its heavy reliance in rejecting excessive fee claims on the idea that marketplace competition is sufficient, in and of itself, to police the expense levels of retail class shares offered to plan participants. This idea is, in many ways, the theoretical foundation of the Seventh Circuit’s seemingly categorical rejection of excessive fee claims, with the Court reasoning that, if market forces have set those fee levels, it is appropriate for plan sponsors to offer them.

However, it is important to recognize what the Court is really saying in Loomis, which is that the mere holding of retail shares – without more – under circumstances in which their pricing is subject to market discipline is not a fiduciary breach; the Seventh Circuit’s rulings in this regard, including in Loomis, are best understood as meaning that something more than that must be shown to make out a fiduciary breach. The Court, in fact, seemed to recognize this when it claimed for its own the Eighth Circuit’s decision in Braden, asserting that it was consistent with the Seventh Circuit’s approach in Hecker (and thus by extension in Loomis) because “the plaintiffs in Braden alleged that the plan sponsor limited participants’ options to ten funds as a result of kickbacks; while adopting the approach of Hecker, the eighth circuit held this allegation sufficient to state a fiduciary claim under ERISA.” The Seventh Circuit then went on in its decision in Loomis to explain why none of the additional assertions of potential fiduciary misconduct, above and beyond simply holding retail class shares, alleged in Loomis was sufficient to demonstrate the existence of the type of additional conduct that constitutes a fiduciary breach, such as existed on the allegations in Braden.

Loomis is therefore not properly read as meaning that excessive fee claims are futile, although it certainly means, in the Seventh Circuit anyway, that alleging excessive fee claims based solely on the decision to hold retail share classes without more is futile. The authority is instead properly read as meaning that something more than that has to be attributed to the fiduciaries to sustain an excessive fee claim, and that this something more must add up on its own to a fiduciary breach. This means that one should put little stock in news flashes, articles and client alerts that claim that Loomis means that excessive fee claims are futile or that holding retail share classes is per se fine; rather, what Loomis means is that excessive fee claims are futile and that holding retail share classes is fine only if participants can find no additional aspect of the fee related decisions that falls below a fiduciary’s standard of care. This is a subtle but clear, and important, difference, one that can cost a plan sponsor a lot of money if that sponsor turns out to be the one that left retail funds in place under circumstances where that additional lack of diligence can be shown.

Further, as many readers know, the federal district court’s decision after trial in Tibble, now up on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, is seen by many as contrary to Hecker and as finding a fiduciary breach in a plan’s holding of retail, rather than institutional, shares. The trial court’s opinion in Tibble, however, did not really find a breach just for that reason, but instead found a breach due to the lack of prudence and diligent investigation by the fiduciaries that led to holding retail share classes. Understanding both Loomis and Tibble in their proper light suggests that they are more in harmony than would appear on first glance; both require something more than just the holding of the retail class shares alone to demonstrate an excessive fee claim and a corresponding breach of fiduciary duty.
 

I have to admit I have never been to Oklahoma. I am not, however, afflicted with the New Yorker’s view of the world and do in fact know where Oklahoma is on a map (I have also been to states that border it, if that counts). Either way though, the next time you have to brief the subject of awarding attorneys’ fees in an ERISA case in the post-Hardt world, you will be able to thank Oklahoma lawyer Renee DeMoss for the fact that you do not have to research the question or even put together your own completely original briefing of the subject to present to the court; she has already done it for you right here, in a structure useable in any jurisdiction.

I don’t have much to say about this, but I would be remiss if I didn’t pass along this article from the New York Times the other day on BrightScope and its founders. The article, rightly, notes that BrightScope has its critics, but there is no denying that their work is adding to the knowledge of, and information available to, plan participants. Ignorance is not bliss, probably ever and certainly not for plan participants when it comes to their investments; as I noted in my most recent post (oddly, also provoked by a Times article), this same idea underlies the Department of Labor’s fee disclosure regulations as well.

This is an interesting article from the New York Times, directed at plan participants who may want to increase the returns in their 401(k)s by decreasing the costs in their plans and of their investments. It is not interesting so much for what it says – nothing in it is likely to be very surprising, or even new, to most regular readers of this blog – but more for two points that it illustrates, both of which line up well with themes that have developed on this blog.

The first is the article’s discussion of the need for plan participants to focus on fees and the need to reduce fees in plans to increase returns; the article operates from the central premise that the plan participants reading the article may not be aware of the fees and expenses in their plans. Both recent litigation – the excessive fee cases – and Department of Labor regulatory initiatives have focused on fee disclosure and the effect of expenses on returns, and a focus on this issue is clearly trickling down – or up, depending on your point of view – into mainstream conversation at the participant level, as the article demonstrates. I have frequently mentioned in posts that the fee disclosure regulations may have more of an indirect impact on sponsors and fee structures than a direct one, in the manner in which sunshine is said to be the great disinfectant, in the classic formulation: bringing the issue out into the open is likely to provoke plan participants to press sponsors to reduce fees and the fear of being sued over fees once the information is more readily available is likely to motivate fiduciaries to focus on the issue. It is a safe bet that this indirect response is likely to have at least some downward impact on fees and expenses in plans, and it is my view that the point of the Department of Labor regulatory initiatives is to have this exact indirect effect, whereby disclosure improves performance rather than the Department having to focus its own resources or enforcement efforts directly at the issue. If they are right and it works – which, as noted, I think it will – they will have accomplished exactly what promulgating regulations should do, which is alter behavior in the intended manner solely through the process of enacting regulation. It is a much cheaper solution, and often more effective because it is prospective rather than backwards looking, then the use of litigation to change conduct.

The second relates to my recent post on Ary Rosenbaum’s article providing a short tutorial on fees and expenses in plans. In this article on excessive fee litigation, I pointed out that the use of shorthand in this area of the law can obfuscate what is really at issue with regard to the fee structure of plans, explaining that:

Certainly the starting point for any discussion of this issue should be an understanding of the nature of excessive fee claims. ERISA lawyers, like other specialists, tend to use shorthand to which only they are privy, and this type of claim is no exception. Pithy references to excessive fee claims, however, shortchange the depth and complexity of what is at issue. Teasing out the phrase’s full meaning gives a much more nuanced picture of what is at stake, and how it impacts fiduciary liability.

The New York Times article is a perfect example of this phenomenon, with the author writing that “plans sold by insurance agents (particularly with onerous “wrap” fees) and by stockbrokers tend to be the most expensive,” without ever explaining what a wrap fee is (leaving aside the question of whether this general statement is always true, only true on the outliers, sometimes true, or maybe true, etc.). This is not unique to the author of this article; the entire industry tends to throw around phrases like “wrap fees” as though everyone in the world knows what they mean, which is not the case. This is particularly not going to be the case at the participant level, which is the target audience of the story. One of the things I particularly liked about Ary’s article, which I referenced in this post here, is his excellent explanation of “wrap fees” for anyone who doesn’t already know what it means.
 

I have commented before, including here, on the fact that there is some inherent tension between the fact that the administration of 401(k) plans costs something and the obligation of sponsors to, nonetheless, keep those costs down. One of the hoped for goals of the Department of Labor’s effort to shed light on fees, expenses, costs and revenue sharing is to make sure that plan sponsors and fiduciaries have an accurate understanding of the expenses paid to run their plans, with the implicit assumption that they will then act on that knowledge (which they will, if they don’t want to end up a defendant in a future excessive fee/costs claim, likely filed as a class action in many cases).

Ary Rosenbaum does a beautiful job in this piece here of explaining the costs of administration, where they are buried, the belief of some – particularly smaller – plan sponsors that they are not paying for plan administration, and the impact on this system that the new disclosure regulations are likely to have. Ary writes regularly on 401(k) management issues, most of which I read, and I think this is his best piece yet. I highly recommend it, particularly for anyone looking for a nice, short yet comprehensive, introduction to the subject (it also has great pictures, if you like alligators).