I have blogged many times on the DOL’s progressive or aggressive (the adjective you choose depends on your view of the changes) program to alter the fiduciary landscape of defined contribution plans, by – in general – increasing the flow of information among providers, participants and plan sponsors on the one hand, and on the other hand decreasing loopholes that allow some providers to avoid fiduciary status. This story here gets right at the heart of one proposed regulatory change that would make it easier for providers who offer financial advice and products to be transformed into fiduciaries, by focusing on the key element of the regulatory change that has the effect; as the author explains:

ERISA regulations [currently] allow many investment service providers to escape fiduciary accountability for the advice that they provide to retirement plan sponsors and participants. The problem is that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974’s definition of “fiduciary” is too narrow and nuanced. In particular, only advice that is both regular and serves as the primary source of decision making gives rise to fiduciary standing. Last October, the Labor Department proposed changing the definition by dropping the “regular” and “primary” requirements so that even one-time or periodic advice that is considered part of the decision-making process by the recipients would make the provider a fiduciary.

I like to think of this change as you make the advice, you own it. As a lawyer, that’s the rule I live by, and frankly I have no choice in the matter, from both the perspective of legal malpractice standards and the profession’s rule of ethics. For me, the fact that outlier lawyers who don’t live up to this will, in my experience, eventually find themselves in trouble, either with judges on their cases, malpractice carriers, or the state bar, means that abiding by this golden rule does not disadvantage me either in the courtroom or in the marketplace for legal services, because it creates what is in general a level playing field: most lawyers abide by this principle, and the ones who don’t will eventually be pushed out of the equation.

To me, for the quality providers of investment advice, this proposed change would do little more than have the same effect. If they are already doing a good job, they should not face any greater barrier to their work simply by this codification of a standard that they are already living up to: if they are doing prudent and informed work already, they have nothing – on a day in day out basis – to fear from being rendered a fiduciary by this change. It is the competitors who are skating by and competing with them by providing a lower quality product who will be at risk, and who will either have to raise their game to the level of the better providers or face the legal exposure that comes from doing shoddy work while operating under the title of fiduciary.
 

I don’t know, maybe I had something rattling around in my brain about statistics in light of the then still pending Wal-Mart case when I wrote my last post, ostensibly about the use (and misuse) of statistics in baseball analysis, and less ostensibly about the use (and misuse) of statistics in litigation. I certainly wasn’t conscious of any concern on my part about the Supreme Court and Wal-Mart when I wrote that post, but the post now seems to have an air of precognition to it, at least in hindsight (one wonders whether it is possible to have precognition in hindsight, given the dictionary definitions of those words, but nonetheless). I particularly wasn’t thinking about Wal-Mart when I wrote that post because, like most casual observers of that case, I had long ago come to think it of as a case about class certification and class action requirements, and not about issues such as the proper role of statistics in litigation.

Regardless, one of the most interesting things right off the bat to me about the Court’s ruling in Wal-Mart is the extent to which its rejection of the statistical evidence at issue mimics the views of statistics in litigation that permeate my post on baseball statistics. As both the Court’s decision and that post suggest, there is no legitimate basis to rely on statistics when they do not, in fact, establish factually a specific point that could not otherwise be proven in a different manner of presenting evidence. This is another way of saying that statistical analysis does not belong in a court case, at any stage, if it does not illuminate – and do so accurately – a point that could not otherwise be shown.
 

I am going to take a flyer, because after all this is my blog, and post a digression that really has nothing to do with the subjects of this blog, other than the fact that it relates to the significance of statistics and their impact on litigation, including financial litigation involving ERISA plans. I have talked before about the extent to which the role of statistics in this area – as in all of litigation, frankly – can quickly move the parties into the netherworld of half-truths, inaccurate modeling, and misleading statistic-based assumptions that spawned the well-worn phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics.” The phrase, for those of you not that familiar with it, basically reflects the idea that statistics, used for evil rather than good, can be used to try to show to be true something that is, in fact, not so, and that absent the cover of statistical analysis and complexity, would be seen quickly as either a lie or a damn lie.

This problem permeates litigation, whenever one moves into areas that require extrapolating from a small set of examples, such as determining damages across an entire class based on the data relevant to a limited number of class members or, in another type of scenario, determining contractual rates of performance by extrapolating from a defendant’s performance in a subset of cases. Cases built around such statistical approaches can run off the tracks, if one side or the other’s statistician applies suspect methodology. Of most fun to me, methodological errors, if the lawyers on the other side are astute enough to recognize them, can invalidate one side’s expert testimony and preclude its submission to a jury.

The extent to which statistics can be used or misused in this type of way to either illuminate or instead obfuscate what would otherwise be discernable to the observer has never been so well-illustrated as it has been in recent years by the explosion in the use of statistical analysis in major league baseball, a point both illustrated by and discussed in this article, from the new, overtly literate sports website Grantland (something I see as an attempt by ESPN to expand its tentacles to swallow up those few of us remaining sports fans who don’t think talking heads on a television screen yelling at each other about sports is all that interesting). Statistical analysis has devoured the front offices of baseball teams, replacing, in many instances, career observers and students of baseball, like a Pat Gillick, with laptop cradling, statistics-obsessed graduates of top-flight universities who, absent this opportunity to use math to grab central roles in baseball front offices, would have taken their math skills to Wall Street, or become well-paid actuaries.

However, what is getting lost in the shuffle here, and perhaps more than that in the smoke, mirrors and obfuscation that statistical analysis, when not properly placed in context, can generate, is that the statistical analysis being provided by the new, younger generation of baseball executives is not a “new” way of looking at baseball at all, but is simply the art of reducing observed reality to data that anyone with an understanding of the math can grasp and apply. What the data and their crunchers are doing is reducing the events that make up baseball games to numbers, so that people without vast experience observing the game and its myriad variations can understand and act on the game’s nuances. These analysts are not, however, doing anything more than illuminating facts that astute observers, after observing thousands of games and the variations inherent in them, have previously mastered based only on decades of watching the game and its possible outcomes in different circumstances, without ever reducing that knowledge to mere numbers and statistical formula. In essence, astute and experienced people who have seen enough baseball can tell you the same thing, and make the same judgment calls about which players are good at what, how to use players, what tactical decisions to make, and what players to sign, without ever needing the crutch of statistical analysis to do so. This, however, takes not just perception – something that not every baseball insider has – but also the decades of experience needed to see enough variation in the game, its players and its outcomes to be able to forecast outcomes. It is neither a coincidence nor an indicia of youthful expertise and comfort with math that the statistical revolution, such that it is, in baseball has resulted in ever younger baseball executives replacing much older, experienced warhorses. Rather, it is because turning the reality of baseball into numbers that can be analyzed independent of actual experience with the sport allows anyone astute enough to manipulate statistics to become an expert of a sort on baseball, without the need to first observe however many tens of thousands of hours of the sport that the old guard, without access to such data, had to see first hand before they could make the same evaluations and reach the same conclusions.

Want proof? You can find it right here in this article on Moneyball on Grantland, with its discussion of fielding being undervalued statistically, and the use of that fact by some teams to improve their ballclubs by focusing their spending on buying fielding. But there is nothing new about the idea that defense wins and that you can win by putting excellent fielders out there; all that is new is the reduction of that maxim to data points. Earl Weaver, whose expertise was developed by a lifetime spent watching baseball games, and who by doing so collected in his head – whether he realized it or not, although I think he did – all of the same data points that the new egghead baseball thinkers collate obsessively and then reduce to formulas on their laptops, always emphasized the importance of defense, yet he retired when most of the current generation of young baseball executives were in elementary school, assuming they were even born yet. Want more? Before the current statistical obsession turned to proving the role and importance of fielding, the baseball stat people were obsessed with demonstrating the lack of importance of bunting, hit and runs, and anything else that gave up outs and at-bats for free, in comparison to the importance of taking advantage of those opportunities at the plate; that whole idea is nothing more than the reduction to numbers of the Earl of Baltimore’s well-known hatred of bunting and the hit and run (something which some observers, incidentally, still think cost his team the 1979 World Series).

The point of this is not to belittle the new generation of baseball experts, who interpret baseball reality by what numbers tell them, but to illustrate a fact which too often gets missed: that statistics in baseball are not a new way of looking at the game, but are instead merely the reduction to numbers of a reality that others were already able to see. It has always troubled me that this simple fact has long been ignored in the glorification of the new baseball statistics, and in the idea that the older generation of baseball experts – people like Jack McKeon who somehow, despite not running SPSS packages for fun at night, still won a championship – suffered from a blind spot and did not know what the numbers showed.

And I suppose if I have to tie it back into the subject of this blog, and to my own professional preoccupations – which include the need to communicate clearly to juries and to understand when expert analysis is only interfering with doing that – I would point out that this is the perfect illustration of exactly how statistics, misused, can misrepresent reality in the courtroom. It is always important to grasp the extent to which statistics are clearly demonstrating a reality that cannot otherwise be seen, and when they are instead simply illustrating what could be seen without statistics and instead with careful observation. If you think about it, under the rules of evidence, statistical evidence doesn’t belong in a case in the latter instance, but can be truly illuminating in the former. The use of statistics in baseball, and how we think of them, is a perfect representation of this distinction.
 

What’s that old saying – your lack of foresight doesn’t make it my emergency, or something to that effect?

I am a little guilty of that here, in my advice to you, at the relative last minute, to hurry up and register for a webinar on the intersection of insurance law, ERISA and fiduciary liability. It is not that last minute, really, in that the webinar isn’t until Thursday, but still, I certainly could have given you more notice.

Either way, I wanted to recommend this upcoming presentation, “ERISA Fiduciaries Under Attack: Key Litigation and Regulatory Developments,” presented by blogger Susan Mangiero and a cast of thousands (well, two actually, but they are good ones), which will cover fiduciary liability issues and the management of those risks through fiduciary liability insurance. As you will no doubt note immediately, the presentation strikes right at the intersection of the two main topics of this blog.

Speaking for myself, I think there is a great deal of misunderstanding out there as to the scope and usefulness of insurance coverage in this area. I don’t think I have previously seen a webinar directly targeting this issue, so I think it’s a good one, and I highly recommend it. You can find out more about it on Susan’s blog, here.
 

Here is a worthwhile, almost Cliffnotes (do they still exist?), guide to the ruling in Amara from the American Lawyer. It continues what is quickly becoming the norm for published pieces discussing the case, which is to present the opinion in an “on the one hand, on the other hand fashion,” by describing it as partly a win for employers, partly a win for employees, and a decision whose real impact and meaning cannot be determined yet. On that last point, I think it is more clear what the decision means long term than various writers are assuming. The opinion firmly directs – whether one calls it a holding or instead dicta is almost irrelevant, since when the majority of the Supreme Court says a case should proceed a particular way, as occurred here, whether that clear direction to the lower courts is actually a holding or just guidance seems to be at most of academic interest – that the proper approach to a case involving a conflict between the language of the SPD and the language of the plan terms is not to treat it as an estoppel question, as the courts have done, but to instead view it as a reformation question, and determine which set of language more accurately fits the intended scope of the plan’s benefits. If you think about it, this more properly and cleanly resolves the question of how to resolve a conflict between the language of the plan and the language of an SPD, as it results in providing the benefits that the plan itself was intended to provide, rather than whatever may be the outcome of a scrivener’s mistake, whether that inaccuracy was buried in the plan (and thus the phrasing of the SPD more accurately reflects the original intent of the plan) or in the SPD itself (in which case the SPD has the language that should be ignored). Moreover, it results in the consistent application of the plan across all plan participants, by enforcing the plan in its proper and intended terms and scope, rather than simply revising it or applying the SPD terms on an ad-hoc basis or case by case basis to suit the circumstances of the particular plan participant who is suing and who may or may not have been prejudiced by the discrepancy. An estoppel theory, and a requirement that a plan participant have been harmed by inconsistent language in the SPD as opposed to the plan terms themselves, almost guarantees that some participants – namely those who relied upon and were prejudiced by differing language in an SPD – will get different and likely greater benefits than those who cannot show this. The reformation approach to reconciling differences between the language of an SPD and the language of a plan is a much cleaner, more consistent and more appropriate way to remedy this type of problem that results in consistent treatment of plan participants in a way that an estoppel theory likely cannot do.

Ran into John Lowell, who writes the Benefits and Compensation with John Lowell blog, the other evening, and we discussed his post on Cigna v. Amara, in which he referenced the fact that no one really knows for certain what the decision will mean in the long run, but he had never seen so many lawyers take pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – so quickly as in response to that decision. Personally, I attribute it to pent up demand, in that many lawyers, myself included, have been watching for that decision for a long time, and had expected it by now; as a result, many were primed to jump right into the fray as soon as it was issued.

John is right though, that what the case means from any sort of a macro level (as opposed to its precise impact on the litigants in that exact case) is solely in the eye of the beholder at this point. The lawyers at Steptoe and Johnson in D.C. say the same thing as John, only with more legalese, commenting that “the Supreme Court’s recent decision in CIGNA Corporation v. Amara, 563 U.S. ____ (5/16/11), may revolutionize the way that employee benefit plans are drafted and the ability of plan participants to overturn provisions that they object to; or it may turn out to be the articulation of theories that have no practical impact.”

And in that is the thing, because the devil here, as in most things, is in the details. There is language and analysis in Amara that is fascinating if, as John noted, you are an ERISA lawyer who likes to wax poetic about the latest doctrinal changes and trends (guilty as charged on this end, to some extent). In fact, I think a young law professor looking to build a career could probably mine aspects of this decision for three or four major papers (feel free to email me and I will give you the topics). The technical lawyering questions about the role of the equitable relief prong addressed in the opinion raise a number of questions, and the difference in jurisprudential philosophy represented by the split between the majority opinion and the concurrence is good for an article or two.

But at the end of the day, we won’t know what the case really means in the long run until courtroom lawyers start applying it to actual facts in a case, and lower courts, and then higher courts, explain how the ideas set forth in Amara interact with those facts. It is when we have a critical mass of cases in which that occurs, and not till then, that we will finally have an answer to the million-dollar question that John posed: namely, why exactly does the case matter.
 

Well, I’m not going to beat Amara to death right now, and hopefully I will be back later on with more thoughtful comments on the decision. However, this wouldn’t be much of an ERISA blog if you couldn’t find a new Supreme Court decision on ERISA on it on the day it is issued, so I offer it to you right here. That said, though, here are some initial thoughts. First, the decision, from a practical perspective, says the ruling below cannot stand the way it is, but the plaintiffs can still eventually win by going back and instead putting in the case under the equitable relief prong of ERISA in the manner sketched out by the majority. This makes the ruling a full employment act for the defense lawyers in the case, who are likely to be working on this case for years more; in fact, the concurrence points out that this alternative theory posited by the majority could set the case up for another run before the Supreme Court, after the lower courts have finished with the alternative theory etched out by the majority. Thought about in this light, you have to wonder how many retirees will still be standing to collect any recovery by that point, given the length of time the lawsuit has been going on to date.

Second, Justices Scalia and Thomas come back, in their concurrence, to a point I discussed with regard to LaRue, namely their feeling that these types of cases can be decided as a matter of simple application of the terms of the statute, without more. Frankly, however, this case in particular is an example of one where you can’t possibly decide how this statute, which speaks only in generalities for the most part, can apply without considering what type of gloss can or should properly be applied to the statutory language. Indeed, this is much of what the majority’s opinion consists of: reading the language of the equitable relief prong in light of the proper gloss to apply to it, historically and in light of prior Court opinions. By doing that though, the majority opinion illustrates the mess that the entire line of cases on what is “equitable” relief for these purposes has become in light of the Court’s past rulings in this regard that attempt to define this by looking at what historically represented part of the equity bar. Simply put, there is no justification for basing a decision in 2011, like this one, that affects the retirements of people who will live well into the 21st century and involves a statute that was enacted in 1974, on treatises concerning the equity bench from the 19th century, as the Court ends up doing here. Jurisprudentially, it’s a wrong-headed approach, but the Court’s past decisions have painted them into that corner; this is yet another decision that points out the need for the Court to work its way out of its existing rubric concerning the scope of equitable relief under ERISA and into a more nuanced and modern approach to determining the scope of claims that can be brought under the equitable relief portions of ERISA.
 

Susan Mangiero, who brings expertise in finance and investments to the discussion over the propriety of various investments in defined contribution plans and whether their presence in a plan can support a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, has written this interesting post on the issue I discussed here, namely the role of CFOs in running plans and different approaches to reducing the fiduciary liability risks of including employer stock as investment options. What she points out is something we litigators, with our backwards looking focus – what is litigation, after all, but a fight over something that already happened? – may not have noticed: namely, that the fights over employer stock are likely laying the ground work for future fights over other investment choices. This idea is interesting, in that breach of fiduciary duty litigation is, in fact, much like the old saying about people who accomplish something who are standing on the shoulders of the people who came before and tilled the ground. Fiduciary duty suits involve the courts confronting a new situation, such as employer stock drops, and creating rules to deal with them, and then later suits involving other similar fiduciary acts build upon, flow from, or distinguish the rules created in those earlier cases. In future cases involving other types of investments, such as the bond losses Susan references, one key factual distinction is going to come into play, which is that stock is unique to a certain extent in this context, because of the competing obligations imposed on company officers by the securities laws and ERISA, which has driven much of the development of the law of stock drop claims in the ERISA context (along with a concern that the class action bar should not be allowed to easily reframe securities class actions as ERISA breach of fiduciary duty cases, a concern that either flows directly from or fits very easily with the recognition that corporate officers are in a position of having to serve different masters with differing agendas, in the form of the securities laws and ERISA, when employer stock is held in a plan). The question for the next round of cases, such as disputes over bond losses, is how comparable those scenarios are to that conflict, as it only makes sense to extend the breach of fiduciary duty rules developed in the employer stock drop context to other types of losses to the extent that similar concerns are as present in those cases as they were in the employer stock drop context.

Live blogging is usually used to mean that someone is attending a seminar and putting up posts about it while there. I mean it differently, that I will be talking live, about the topics I regularly address in my blog posts, at this seminar on May 10 hosted by Asset Strategy Consultants-Boston. The seminar is open to plan sponsors and their advisors, and I will be opening the event by speaking on "Hot Topics in Fiduciary Governance: Limiting the Risks Inherent in Selecting Plan Investment Options.”

Other speakers include Mary Rosen from the Department of Labor, as well as Todd Mann of AllianceBernstein Investments and Mark Griffith of the host, Asset Strategy Consultants-Boston. Mary and I spoke together on a panel awhile back in Boston, and her comments on the current focus of the DOL alone tend to be worth the price of admission.

Information on registering for the seminar can be found on this invitation, if you would like to attend. I hope to see many of you there next week.
 

This is an interesting piece on one of the most loaded issues in ERISA litigation, namely the potential personal liability of corporate officers who run a company’s benefit plans, in particular their defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s or ESOPs. The article drives home the fact that when CFOs or other officers are named as the fiduciaries, as is often the case with company plans, they are thereby opened up to liability for any problems in the operation of the plans that can be characterized as breaches of fiduciary duty. Importantly, however, and on a topic that the article skips over (it’s a short article, and a point likely deliberately beyond its scope), corporate officers who get intimately involved with the operations of such plans are likely to be targeted as fiduciaries in litigation, and may well be found to be fiduciaries, even if the plan at issue avoids naming them as fiduciaries; their involvement is bound to render them so-called deemed or functional fiduciaries, which opens them up to much the same liability risk.

The article focuses on the problems for those corporate officers, and in particular CFOs, that stem from holding employer stock in plans, which are acute as a result of the inherent conflict between the business needs of the company with regard to its publicly traded stock and the potentially distinct risks to plan participants of financial loss from holding that stock in a plan. When problems with a stock arise, a corporate officer’s actions in response in one direction may benefit one side of that equation at the expense of the other, at the same time that different actions by that same officer could reverse that calculus. When the resolution of that problem results in losses to the company stock held by the plan or its participants, the fiduciaries enter the cross-hairs for litigation and potential resulting liability based on the possibility they have breached their fiduciary duties to the plan participants by those actions.

The article poses as one solution the creation of a data driven system that preordains decision making with regard to company stock holdings, based on such issues as changes in stock price, etc., thereby taking the day in, day out discretion over what to do with the stock holdings out of the hands of the fiduciaries. There are many benefits to such an approach when it comes to defending possible breach of fiduciary duty claims down the road involving those stock holdings, but it is far from a get out of jail free card. At a minimum, the corporate officers who have been serving as plan fiduciaries, whether in name or by operation of law, are likely to be accused of having breached their fiduciary duties by erring in creating, selecting and putting the automatic system into place in the first place, and by failing to monitor or adjust the system along the way in response to any changing dynamics in the marketplace. As the Seventh Circuit’s decision this month in Kraft Foods reflects, there is no doubt that good class action lawyers and good financial experts can identify and target financial anomalies in any system designed to process employer stock holdings, and they will do that with this approach as well. It doesn’t mean the author’s proposal doesn’t have merit, and I can see many ways in which it would strongly aid in the defense of a breach of fiduciary duty claim against corporate officers.

However, it doesn’t change the fact that the best approach to the defense of such corporate officers is either to keep employer stock out of the plan itself or, in a move court tested and approved by at least one circuit, move the entire management and decision making on whether to hold company stock or not, and if so when to buy and sell it, out of the company and onto very qualified outside advisors. This will still, just like the case as noted above with regard to the author’s proposal for creating an automated system, not completely exempt the corporate officers who are fiduciaries from the risk of liability, but will make it very, very hard to recover from them; they can still be sued for alleged errors in selecting and then failing to monitor that outside advisor, but if the outside experts are well-chosen, that’s going to be a hard row to hoe to recover from them.