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.
 

This is interesting – it’s the story, in abbreviated form, of the Seventh Circuit breathing new life into an excessive fee class action case, by finding that there is a factual question of whether the fiduciaries properly evaluated their options and that the defendants cannot insulate themselves easily from their obligation to properly monitor and test fee levels. Its also an interesting case on the question of the fiduciaries’ obligations with regard to structuring an employer stock fund and on the effect of such choices on returns net of expenses. The case itself is George v Kraft Foods Global, and you can find the opinion itself here.

The case jumped out at me for three reasons. The first is that it runs counter to the assumption, expressed in many quarters, that the Seventh Circuit’s prior and highly publicized ruling in Hecker created a significant barrier, and possibly spelled the death knell, for claims built around excessive fees and costs for plan investment options. Many, including me, thought the Seventh Circuit went too far in that regard at that time, and that excessive fee claims needed to be evaluated on the micro-level of the actual facts of the fiduciary’s conduct to decide whether a claim was viable, which was not the approach taken in Hecker. This latest case out of the Seventh Circuit seems to move in that direction, as it is clearly a fact specific investigation of the issue, one that found that the plaintiffs were free to make out such a case on the actual facts of the fiduciaries’ conduct.

The second is that this ruling thereby fit perfectly with the thesis of my article on excessive fee claims after Hecker, referenced here, which posited that subsequent judicial and regulatory developments would move the case law away from the approach of the court in Hecker and toward the approach taken in this most recent Seventh Circuit case. Time seems to be bearing out my forecast.

The third is the nature of this claim involving breach of fiduciary duty involving employer stock holdings. We all know that the traditional form for such claims is the stock drop case, in which the complaint is that the plan should not have been holding employer stock which then dropped significantly in value. In many jurisdictions, this is no longer a promising approach (although not in all, and for good reason, an issue for another day). Here, however, we see a revamping of the traditional approach to such claims, one that makes the stock holdings aspect of an investment plan a possibly significant basis for a breach of fiduciary duty claim under ERISA. Those plaintiffs’ class action lawyers – what will they think of next?
 

I thought I would pass along that my article on the law of excessive fee claims under ERISA is coming out this week in the Spring 2011 edition of the Journal of Pension Benefits. Titled “Retreat from the High Water Mark: Breach of Fiduciary Duty Claims Involving Excessive Fees After Tibble v. Edison International,” the article explores the interplay of the Seventh Circuit’s reasoning in Hecker (a case I have discussed often on this blog), the detailed fact finding of the trial judge in Tibble, and the regulatory changes related to fees and fiduciary status being enacted by the DOL. The article’s takeaway – since as many of you already know, I tend to think that legal writing that doesn’t tie things up with a lesson or a conclusion that will help practitioners or clients is wasted ink – concerns how to structure plans to reduce potential liability in light of these developments.

Here is a link to the abstract for the article, which will also give you the full cite if you want to track it down.
 

Funny, this chart from Bloomberg on the top rated 401(k) plans in the country, taken from the BrightScope data. When I first discovered BrightScope’s beta site and blogged on it, I was struck by the fact that if you want a good retirement, you should go to work for the Saudi Arabian oil company. This chart highlights that this advice, cheap and useless though it is, is still sound. But what’s not a throwaway comment about this chart is this: take a look a this list of the best 401(k) plans, and then look at the companies. It’s a cross sample of some of the most successful companies in America. So what comes first? Does the success breed large account balances? Or do employees who feel the company has their back on benefit plans, such as 401(k) plans, build a better company? My gut instinct from a lifetime of work and a professional career working on benefit and plan disputes is that the answer to both is yes, in that it is a self-reinforcing cycle. Properly treated employees build a better and wealthier company, which in turns leads to larger account balances in 401(k) plans (because of employer matching, because employees have more income to invest, and because employees think they will be there long enough for it to be a worthwhile undertaking), which in turn leads to more highly motivated employees, which in turn leads to a more successful company, which in turn . . . Well, you get the picture.

One underlying theme of much commentary about 401(k) plans is the idea that their replacement of pensions as the primary retirement vehicle for most private sector workers was not intended, and is the walking, talking example of the law of unintended consequences. Seen as it was in its origin myth – as a supplemental retirement investment vehicle – its flaws become less significant; for instance, questions of the appropriate levels of fees, or whether and under what circumstances to include employer stock, are less important when the risks of reduced return from those issues impact not the participant’s primary retirement investment, but rather a supplement to it. In some ways, that is the revolution of BrightScope. I have spoken with lawyers and industry people who quibble (and sometimes outright quarrel) with its math, but the reality is that, regardless, it is the first public forum (that I know of, anyway) to really treat 401(k)s as what they truly are: the primary retirement vehicle for a vast swath of the public. Viewed in that light, every piece of information that impacts or reduces performance, which BrightScope tries to capture and communicate to the participants, is of the utmost importance, something that would not be the case if 401(k)s played a less central role in employee retirement planning.

I was thinking of this today because of two stories on issues involving the use of ESOPs and 401(k) plans for purposes other than retirement income accumulation; in both cases, for the more traditional purpose – in my mind anyway – of motivating employees and managing tax exposures. As tools for these purposes, they have more value and less risk than they do as primary retirement vehicles. Both though are subject to distortion depending on the nature of the management of them: the ESOP by misuse, as I have written before, as a tempting tool for corporate transactions and the 401(k) by mismanagement of its investment selection and cost. Each risk is countered, or supposed to be, by the fiduciary obligations of those operating the plans, and at heart this is what the Department of Labor initiatives to expand the scope of fiduciaries is targeted at: making sure that all those who play a management or similar key role in the operation of these types of plans become fiduciaries and are subject to the discipline imposed by that status, in terms of potential liability exposure, behavioral demands and expectations, and litigation risks.
 

I have mentioned to people in the past that I am reasonably confident that I am the only author of legal information who has managed to link Walker Percy, denied benefit claims and ERISA in the same publication, which I did here in this post. I think that’s a pretty good stupid human trick myself. Adam Pozek’s linking of Warren Zevon, Werewolves of London, 401(k) plans and the 404(c) defense, although a little less obscure in its references, is pretty good too. It also has the benefit – pun intended – of being accurate and informative, and a nice little walk through the realities of the 404(c) defense, all at the same time.