Well, geez, I am embarrassed by the awkward silence in this space over the past couple of weeks. I was out of the country on business for a bit, and digging out ever since. Not that I ever lost sight of the ball, though, as I kept jotting down stories and developments that I wanted to pass along in a blog post. I am going to do that right now, clearing my desk of two of them.

In the first one, I had wanted to pass along this excellent and thought provoking post from Adam Pozek’s Pozek on Pensions, in which he discusses the regulatory changes being developed by the Department of Labor related to who is a fiduciary and what information has to be disclosed to and by fiduciaries. Adam makes the point that what should not be lost in these developments, and in the controversies the changes engender – see here, for instance – is that they do not change the actual obligations of plan fiduciaries to act reasonably and conduct appropriate investigation; those obligations have always been there and continue to be there. The only thing that is changing is what information is available as part of that obligation and how it may impact a fiduciary’s compliance with that obligation. I have discussed before that the disclosure of further information through this regulatory structure will almost certainly shift the nature of fiduciary liability and litigation, and affect how such claims are structured and how they are defended. They don’t, however, change the fundamental, underlying legal obligation of fiduciaries, a point Adam drives home in his post and which, perhaps implicitly, he is reminding us of as we get lost in the details of these regulatory changes.

The second item I had wanted to highlight was this blog, by John Lowell of Cassidy Retirement Group, titled – in a walking, talking exemplar of transparency – Benefits and Compensation with John Lowell. John’s experience shines through in his posts, which are detailed, thought provoking and frankly, compared to much of what one finds on blogs, highly original. For my purposes, and for any of the rest of us waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in Amara, I particularly liked his real world discussion of the problem of misleading and inaccurate summary plan descriptions, which you can find here.
 

Why do I blog? For the swag, of course. Well, no, not really, but I did just receive a review copy of Randy Maniloff and Jeffrey Stempel’s new General Liability Insurance Coverage deskbook, and it is tremendous. The book bears the subtitle “Key Issues in Every State,” and that phrase on the book’s cover is a perfect example of truth in advertising. The authors take the primary key issues in handling general liability claims, from the beginning (whether there is a duty to defend) to the end (how should recovery from the insured be allocated among multiple insurers) and provide a detailed synopsis of the law, with citations to key authority, on each issue in every state. Although that sounds like a recipe for a dense, possibly impenetrable text, here at least, in these authors’ hands, it is not, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has read any of Randy’s annual reviews of a preceding year’s top insurance coverage decisions. The book is instead, if such a thing is possible in this context, a breezy read.

Substantively, I am more and more impressed each time I turn to it. In the first 24 hours it was on my desk, I referenced it as a starting point for research into the issues in two or three different cases. For someone like me and most other experienced insurance coverage practitioners, who are already more than conversant in the broad themes of insurance law, the devil is in the details on a daily basis; we spot the issues right off the bat, and then need to ascertain how a particular state’s law handles those issues. Randy and Jeffrey’s book provides a ready starting point for research into a particular state’s law, and in many cases, an answer right off the bat to how a particular state handles certain issues, such as whether an insurer can obtain reimbursement of defense costs or how that state determines the number of occurrences under a general liability policy.

For anyone who deals with insurance claims issues on a daily basis, whether as a coverage lawyer or a claims professional, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Insurance coverage, as a practice area, is such a research intensive activity that anything that reduces the time needed to research and answer a question makes the practice more fun and saves clients money, all at the same time. This book does that.

Now if you don’t write a blog, you can’t count on swag to get a copy, but you can get it here.

Alert reader Tom Obara of Cassidy Retirement Group here in Massachusetts – or as I have taken to calling it during this perpetually snowy winter, East Dakota – passed along to me an article on behavioral finance in January’s issue of PlanSponsor in which I am quoted on the need for plan sponsors to adequately educate and inform plan participants about investment options and the risks they pose. You can find the article, called “Misbehavioral Finance,” here, and this is what I had to say on the matter:

Not delivering a reality check: Some of the wave of participant lawsuits since the 2008 crash could have been prevented if sponsors had delivered the message more clearly throughout to DC participants that they bear ultimate responsibility for their retirement security, believes Stephen Rosenberg, a Boston-based Partner at law firm The McCormack Firm, LLC, who works primarily with employers. “There are some lawsuits that suggest they do not want to rock the boat in telling people who are already concerned about their declining house value anything else that could worry them,” he says.

Employers should have been delivering that reality check all along, Rosenberg thinks. “There is little doubt that years and years of significant asset growth meant that many people did not pay attention to the risks and the fees. It has left people with very unrealistic beliefs and expectations,” he says. “I do not think that they were educated enough in advance. It is easier for plan sponsors, as well as for their vendors, to not really point out the risks or exposures and just let everybody be happy.” Employees need to get the clear message that “you cannot just rely on the company to get you there,” he says of retirement security. They need to know, he says, that a 401(k) “is something different from what your parents had, or what you wish you had.”

Now lets be clear. No amount of information, education and disclosure is going to insulate a plan against class actions if there is a problem in a plan that the class action bar thinks can be targeted (and let’s make sure we are fair: sometimes the class action bar is right and a plan does have legitimate problems that call for class wide relief). They will always be able to find some plan participants who are unhappy enough to serve as class representatives, no matter how much information the plan sponsor had imparted to those individuals. But it is my view and my experience that many individual complaints and individual participant lawsuits can be avoided by educating participants properly about their investments; many suits arise because participants feel blindsided and misled, and that is a dynamic that disclosure and education can defuse. Beyond that, there is little doubt in my mind that an educated workforce that, even when 401(k) balances decline, is knowledgeable enough to understand that risk and even to have foreseen that possibility, is a happier workforce, and one that suffers less damage to its morale in a downturn. Isn’t that a good enough reason right there to expand disclosure and education to plan participants?

Here is a terrific article on the lessons about directors and officers insurance that should be taken from a series of rulings that eventually ended coverage for the Stanford Financial executives. I have said many times that because the scope of D & O insurance is so dependent on the scope of the exclusions, it is important to analyze and understand them when the policy is being acquired, and not wait until after a claim is made, when it may well be too late. That is, in essence, what happened to these executives; as the authors of the article point out, had they sought narrower exclusionary language when they acquired the policy, they might well have avoided the rulings against them that ended their insurance coverage. Of more precise importance, I have discussed in prior posts the significance of exclusions that apply if a certain conduct “in fact” happened; the article addresses the meaning of this language in depth, and contrasts it to other wording that, if used instead, would narrow the scope of the exclusion and, by extension, expand the scope of the coverage.

Ouch. Here’s the story of a payroll company that overpaid salary for years to an employee of its client company, because that employee was authorized to provide the payroll company with payroll information and direct it to issue payments; according to the case, she requested additional payments to herself and the payroll company made those payments. Who bears the loss here, the client company or the payroll company it hired? The former, not the latter, because the contract between the client and the payroll company could most fairly be interpreted as assigning the risk in that manner. Here is the opinion, and blogger Stanley Baum down in New York has a detailed review of the case here.

Anyone, like me, who has represented third party administrators hired by plan sponsors has seen the outline of this problem before, although often under less sinister circumstances; disputes in this relationship usually arise out of performance issues by the third party administrator relating to its operation of a benefit plan, followed by litigation over who is responsible and to what degree for those problems. Inevitably, as in the case of this payroll administrator, the linchpin of the dispute becomes the terms of the contract between the parties, and often those contracts are written in ways that protect the third party administrator from, or strongly limit its liability for, losses from its operation of the plan. As I have argued in court in the past when speaking on behalf of a third party administrator in that relationship, if the sponsor wanted different performance obligations or stronger remedies for performance failings, it should have written them into the contract in the first place. That is the story here, as well: any third party administrator contract requires looking a little bit into the future and guessing at the potential problems that may occur down the road, and allocating responsibility for them in the contract before they occur. Sure, its easier said than done, but that should be part of what a plan sponsor is paying for when it hires an attorney to deal with these types of contracts.

Here is a nice article from Planadviser.com that sums up the recent opinion out of the Seventh Circuit that I discussed the other day in this post, on the propriety of certifying classes of plan participants in excessive fee cases. The article does a nice job of summing up the findings on that issue, if you don’t want to read the court’s fairly long, but well written analysis of the issue.

One of the impressions you may get from the article is that, in some manner, certifying a class in such a case may be difficult, but I don’t think that is a fair reading of the case or of the events in the litigation itself that gave rise to the ruling. If you think about it, there is little question that each plan participant’s account rises and falls on its own, independent of those of other plan participants to a certain extent, and that harm to one may not be harm to all. However, there is also little question that if there is an overarching problem with the plan that runs across all or many participants’ accounts – such as fees that are too high with certain investment options – that many participants may be injured in the same way and to a similar extent. What the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Spano suggests, rightfully I think, is that, under these circumstances, one has to think carefully about how a class should be defined and of whom it should consist. There is no reason to draft a broad class definition that simply includes all plan participants, and instead a class should be constructed that is limited to those plan participants who actually invested in the specified investment options that are shown to have had excessive fees or other fiduciary breaches during the time period that the problems existed. That is not a lot to ask to make sure that class action litigation actually serves it purposes and satisfies the procedural and other legal limitations that exist to ensure that it does so, and doesn’t run off the tracks. It certainly requires more thinking, study and analysis of the actual scope of the investment problems at the class certification stage, rather than simply certifying the class and waiting to figure that out during the merits portion of the case, but isn’t that, after all, what class certification discovery exists for?

Just idle musings for a Monday morning.

I have been blogging long enough that I can bore people by pontificating about how blogging was easier back in the old days. It’s actually true though, to some extent, at least with regard to my blog, and that’s because when I first started blogging, Paul Secunda, at the Workplace Prof blog, was still posting regularly on scholarly and legal developments concerning ERISA. He has stepped back from doing that over the past couple of years, leaving me with one less source of ready made analysis and commentary to mine.

Paul has stepped back into the salt mines, though, with this interesting post on the Third Circuit’s recent consideration of conflicts of interest under the MetLfe v. Glenn rubric. On some levels, I agree with Paul’s comment in his post that he doubts the new regime ushered in by Glenn will change the outcome of many denied benefit cases, only I agree with him from the opposite perspective: it was always my opinion that, in the courtroom, the evidence typically pointed the way to the right result regardless of the existence or non-existence of what has come to be known as a structural conflict of interest on the part of the decision maker. As I wrote in many posts back in the era when different circuits had different approaches to this issue, leading eventually to the Glenn ruling, it was more often than not my experience that the administrative record in a given case could tell you whether the decision was improperly influenced by outside factors – i.e., anything other than the facts of the participant’s claim – and thus there was generally no evidentiary reason to care one way or the other whether the decision maker, independent from what the administrative record itself showed, was acting with a conflict.

What is interesting to me at this point about this topic is that we are probably far enough along into the post-Glenn world that an academic could sit down with pre- and post-Glenn denied benefit decisions from the courts and analyze, in a statistically accurate manner, whether the Glenn rules have had a measurable impact on the outcome of these types of case. How about it, Paul? Time to bring the law and statistics movement to bear on ERISA questions?

I have written before about the various implications of the Supreme Court broadening fiduciary duty claims in LaRue to allow individual participants to sue for losses only to their own accounts, rather than just for harms suffered by all participants, or in other words, by the plan as a whole; among other aspects, I have discussed its interplay with the class action rules, and the importance for the development of the law of ERISA of the Court’s distinction in that case between defined benefit plans and defined contribution plans.

On the first point, I have noted that the famous – to a small group of interested observers otherwise known as ERISA lawyers and scholars – role played in LaRue by the so-called (by me, anyway) diamond hypothetical may have a wide range of implications for the development of the law, not all of them either intended or even foreseeable. Under the diamond hypothetical, each participant’s account in a defined contribution plan can be understood to contain its own specific bunch of diamonds, which all together add up to make up the totality of the diamonds held by the plan; this is different than a defined benefit plan, in which the diamonds are not subdivided in that manner, but instead are merely held in their entirety as the plan’s assets. I have blogged before about the question of whether this meant that an individual plan participant who suffered no harm to his particular account – i.e., his diamonds didn’t vanish – could proceed as a class representative where other plan participants did suffer harm in their accounts – i.e, their diamonds did vanish – or could seek relief on a plan wide basis. Judge Gertner of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts has a nice discussion of the diamond hypothetical in the footnotes of her opinion that is discussed in this post.

In a decision interesting on a number of fronts, the Seventh Circuit has now addressed this same issue in detail, in the context of deciding whether class certification orders in excessive fee cases involving defined contribution plans were appropriate. In Spano v. Boeing, the Court focused on the implication of the diamond hypothetical structure of defined contribution plans (without mentioning the diamond hypothetical), finding that class certification can be proper, despite the fact that each plan participant has his or her own individual account and possible loss, after LaRue, but that the particular injury to the different participants’ accounts had to be examined to determine whether class certification was appropriate with regard to the particular theory being pursued by the class and the representative plaintiffs. In essence, class certification may not be appropriate if there is too much variance in the impact on different participants’ accounts of the challenged conduct. The opinion is a fascinating read on this question, and you can find it here.

The opinion is notable for a number of other reasons as well, some of which I may return to in further posts, but one of which I will mention here. I have posted in the past that the Supreme Court’s opinion in LaRue invited courts to revisit the rules in place with regard to defined benefit plans when instead evaluating claims concerning defined contribution plans, and emphasized that the rules applicable to the former may not properly fit the latter. I have pointed out as well that figuring out where or how the rules should diverge in the two contexts should open up avenues for participants’ lawyers to try to advance their cases when pressing claims involving defined contribution plans. The Seventh Circuit drives home both this point and this new reality in Spano, recognizing this dynamic put into play by the Supreme Court in LaRue.
 

Well, I am not sure I could have said this better myself, although in post after post, I have spoken of the increasing litigation risk for fiduciaries, and of the need to respond by emphasizing compliance and diligence in designing and running 401(k) plans. At the end of the day, ERISA has become a fertile ground for litigation, and the inherent conflicts and difficulties in running 401(k) plans are exposing fiduciaries to lawsuits and the potential of personal liability. Susan Mangiero, in this post on her blog Good Risk Governance Pays, surveys this landscape and explains what is putting fiduciaries ever more at risk. Two particular aspects of her post are worth highlighting. The first is her reference to a leveling off of fees, and her attribution of that event to litigation risk; we are coming through a storm of lawsuits over investment fees and expenses in 401(k) plans, all alleging – in one way or another – that sponsors and fiduciaries should have used their market power to obtain lower fees. It is often remarked that litigation is a terribly blunt instrument to effect change (its also expensive and not terribly efficient), but it may have done so here and, if so, those of us who labor in the vineyards of the court system should be pleased by the system’s ability to effect change. The second is her discussion of the series of changes that are affecting fiduciaries, each of which in one way or the other has the potential to expand fiduciary liability, if manipulated well by counsel for participants. I have written many times that we are in an era of evolution of fiduciary liability under ERISA, driven by the old Marx line that at the end of the day, everything is economics. As I have written before, the simple fact is that 401(k) plans – and worse yet losses – have become the fundamental reality of retirement for most employees, and with that change in the economic environment is going to come change in the risks, obligations, demands and legal exposure of the fiduciaries of such plans; we see that here in Susan’s post as well.

Like most lawyers who represent plans or their administrators in denied benefit disputes, one of the first things I check when a participant’s complaint is forwarded to me is whether the participant exhausted all review opportunities with the plan’s administrator. If not, the defense of failure to exhaust administrative remedies needs to be raised. For those on the opposite side of the “v” (i.e., the plaintiff), however, whether or not the failure to exhaust administrative remedies is fatal is not so cut and dry. Circuits vary on the circumstances under which such a defense is outcome determinative, and most circuits – probably all, but I have to admit I haven’t surveyed the more out of the way circuits on this question – provide participants with ways around this defense, as this informative blog post illustrates.