In my life as a trial lawyer, I have found myself in a recurrent situation, in which a judge or an arbitrator eventually looks at me in an argument over discovery and asks if I really want the information I am after, as it could run against me. I always answer the same way, to the effect that I am comfortable with facts, believe that more information is more likely to lead to the just result in the case, that I will trust the facts to show us which way to go, and that I am more than willing to let the facts come out in the open and drive the case. Now, the truth is that, before ever seeking the discovery that is at issue, I will have long since thought through the subject and become convinced that the evidence in question, once brought out, is far more likely to help my case than to harm it; the reality, from a tactical perspective is that, otherwise, I would not have pressed the point in the first place, with me going so far as to ask a court or arbitration panel to order production of the witness, or documents, or whatever else is in question. That said though, my response – to the effect that I favor the facts coming to light – is a true sentiment. Facts are stubborn things, in the classic formulation, and they decide cases; I am more than happy to have them see the light of day. Heck, I would certainly like to know of them while I can do something about them, even if they are bad for my case, than have them just show up for the first time out of some witness’ mouth on the stand in the middle of a trial.

I thought of this when I read this investment manager’s discussion of the Department of Labor’s expansion of the term fiduciary, which I discussed in my last post, and of the Department’s various initiatives related to fee disclosure, in particular his discussion of lobbying against those actions. Like facts in a lawsuit, the facts of revenue sharing, fees, and the like belong in the open, and can do nothing at the end of the day but improve outcomes for participants, plan sponsors, fiduciaries and the better advisors. What’s wrong with a little sunshine, a little transparency, and a lot of disclosure in this context? Frankly speaking, probably nothing. Participants will eventually end up with better outcomes, while plan sponsors and fiduciaries will have the information needed to best do their jobs, which will – if they use the information right – make them far less likely to get sued or, if sued, be held liable for fiduciary breaches. Meanwhile, we all know that advisors get paid fees, as of course they should; the only change is that everyone involved in the decision making will know who is getting paid what and for what exact services. Under that – possibly excessively rosy – view of the world, the end result should just be that the better advisors, who are providing better products and services at better prices, will get more of the business. What’s wrong with that, from a forest eye view?

I have written before, on many occasions, about the evolving nature of fiduciary status, and in particular on the shifting regulatory landscape in this regard. Here is an interview I gave to Fiduciary News on the latest proposed Department of Labor regulatory change concerning the meaning of the word fiduciary in the ERISA context. If you want more background detail on that regulatory change itself, you can find it here.

Nothing proliferates around the New Year like top ten lists; I blame David Letterman for it, and believe some academic somewhere in a popular culture department should examine the pre- and post – Letterman frequency of top ten lists in American society. That said, though, my all time favorite top ten list was Letterman’s top ten children’s book titles that haven’t been published but should be, which included my favorite book title (fictional or otherwise) ever, which was “Daddy Drinks Because You Cry.”

My second favorite top ten list comes out every holiday season, and is Randy Maniloff’s Top Ten Insurance Coverage Decisions of the expiring year, an article that he always manages to make both educational and amusing at the same time, which is an extremely hard trick. He’s pulled that off again this year, and so for my final post of 2010, I send you to it to read.

I talk regularly, of course, about the importance of compliance in the operation of ERISA plans – just take a look at my immediately preceding post for instance – but that is just a fancy way of restating the old saw that an ounce of prevention (in the form of a well run plan) is worth a pound of cure. As an ERISA litigator, the cure – litigation – is better business for me than the ounce of prevention ever could be, but that doesn’t change the basic fact that the only real precaution against litigation costs and liability is a well run plan, and the best defense against a lawsuit that arises anyway is the same thing -a well run plan.

But how do you get to a well run plan? While there are a number of ways to get there, here are a couple. Ary Rosenbaum, in this piece, explains why one step towards a well run plan is to bring in expert legal advice on the compliance aspects of the plan right from the get go. A true ounce of prevention strategy if I have ever heard one. Another is to constantly increase the knowledge base of a plan’s decision makers. On that front, Pozek on Pension’s Adam Pozek and ERISA lawyer Ilene Ferenczy have created a really useful little engine for accomplishing that, in the form of a series of webinars offered by Pension Pundits LLC. Their next one, coming up shortly after the first of the year, is on non-discrimination testing, and you can sign up for it here. At the end of the day, litigation costs too much money, even if a plan’s sponsor and its fiduciaries prevail, to not take advantage of these type of opportunities to avoid getting sued.

I tell people all the time when I speak at seminars that compliance is key because in a downturn, participants will sue plans and their fiduciaries over things they just ignored when the markets just kept going up, up and up, with participants’ account balances doing the same. I have frequently noted this in posts as well here on this blog, reminding people that when the market goes up, participants don’t get upset that compliance problems or excessive fees or the like meant they earned “only” 12 or 14% in a given year, rather then 15 or 16% in that year, but they get plenty upset when those problems in a plan mean the difference between a loss and a bigger loss.

My support for this premise has always been anecdotal, based on what I see in litigation and learn in my discussions with fiduciaries, plan sponsors, vendors and participants. It appears there is some verifiable independent data to back this up, though:

The amount of lawsuits associated with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) have increased significantly since the beginning of the recession, the Rockford Register Star reports.

According to data from the US District Court, 9,300 lawsuits related to ERISA were filed in the country during the 12-month span that ended on March 31, 2010. While that number is lower than the nearly 11,500 lawsuits in 2004, it represents a significant increase since the beginning of the recession, according to the news provider.

 

There is almost nothing I can add to this extremely sad story two days before Christmas, other than to point out that, for the criticism ERISA takes for preemption and its limited scope of remedies, the structure has done a pretty good job of accomplishing its true initial goal, which was to keep private pension plans from winding up like the public pension plan in Prichard Alabama.
 

I have discussed in many posts the idea that the plaintiffs’ class action bar has alighted on ERISA and breach of fiduciary duty claims as a preferable tactical alternative, in many cases, to proceeding under the securities laws. This approach was a particularly nice fit for stock drop cases, in which company stock held in employee benefit plans rendered ERISA, and its relatively – at least compared to the securities laws – more malleable breach of fiduciary duty doctrines, a viable approach to seeking recovery for precipitous declines in company stock prices. To date that tactic – which made sense as a legal and tactical theory in the abstract – has not really worked out all that well with regard to decline in the value of company stock holdings, because of the oft-discussed Moench doctrine, which provides a strong presumption in favor of plan fiduciaries when it comes to holding company stock.

This article here, however, discusses what has, at least in perfect hindsight, turned out to be an excellent example of taking a good idea – at least if you are a class action lawyer or a plan participant – a little too far, by choosing to proceed under ERISA in a large putative class action rather than under the securities laws, only to have the court subsequently conclude that ERISA cannot apply under the facts of the particular case, and that the participants should have gone forward under the securities laws in the first place. The case it discusses, Daniels-Hall v. National Education Association out of the Ninth Circuit, can be found here, and for the ERISA practitioner, it may be more significant for its detailed analysis of the government plan exemption in ERISA than for its conclusion that the plaintiffs had overreached by relying on ERISA rather than the securities law to proceed with their case. The issue of the choice of legal doctrine to pursue is one of tactics, and reasonable lawyers can disagree at the outset of a case as to which of many plausible lines of attack should be pursued; either way, over time, the current preference for ERISA over the securities laws as a matter of tactics will likely run its course. Debates over whether a particular plan is a government plan, however, will continue to pop up, and the Ninth Circuit’s decision provides a sound template for analyzing that issue.

Can a fiduciary of a pension plan or other employee retirement account trade in derivatives without breaching his fiduciary duty? If this article from the New York Times is to be believed, then the answer is really no. If there is no transparency to fees and costs of the undertaking, than, theoretically, a fiduciary cannot truthfully say whether or not the transaction is financially appropriate in light of its costs to the plan and whether the assets of the plan are in turn being handled properly. Further, a fiduciary’s obligations run more to the duty to investigate and properly handle a plan’s investments than it does to ensure the best outcome; it would not seem that a fiduciary can engage in the due diligence necessary to satisfy his, her or its duty of prudence if the fiduciary cannot obtain clear and accurate information about an investment opportunity, which the article suggests cannot be done as part of a derivative based investment.

Now on some levels this reads like a perfect law school exam hypothetical: here is a widely used investment in which there is no transparency as to costs and the like; now identify all of the ways in which investing in them would violate the fiduciary obligations of plan sponsors and others with regard to an ERISA governed retirement plan. At the same time, though, ERISA has to have some flexibility to allow the real world to be accounted for, and if derivatives may in some instances be an appropriate investment for a pension plan, fiduciaries should be allowed to make use of them, despite having access to only imperfect information. The question, from a fiduciary liability perspective, is where in the middle of those two extremes does fiduciary obligation, duty and breach lie? It unquestionably is somewhere in the middle, and if and when a retirement plan is sued for underperforming due to the use of derivatives, we may well find out exactly where in the middle that line rests.

I have been keeping my eye out for an article on the CIGNA Corp. v. Amara case before the Supreme Court – argued a little over a week ago – that focuses more on the practical realities of the case for plan sponsors and participants, rather than on the “inside baseball” analysis of the lawyers and their arguments, which were all the rage in the immediate aftermath of the argument before the high court. I think I finally found it here, in this piece from CFO.com. I have to say that my view of the case, the arguments, and the analysis about it floating around out there have me perpetually in an “on the one hand, on the other hand” mindset about the case, which of course – as someone paid by people to give them definitive advice on which they can actually act – makes me think of Harry Truman’s famous line that he wanted a one-armed economic advisor, because when asked for his opinion he wouldn’t be able to tell the president on the one hand this, and on the other hand that.

As the CFO article points out, the central practical question here is the impact of potentially misleading or, more innocuously, simply incorrect summary plan descriptions, ones that do not accurately state the terms of a plan itself. As the CFO article points out, allowing the SPD to govern or at least alter the benefits by operation of its variance from the actual plan terms – something which in this instance could cost the plan sponsor $70 million or so – can result in a large, unfunded expense and a benefit plan of a scale a company never intended to offer. That really isn’t and was never the point of ERISA, which was to encourage companies to offer benefit plans; whacking them for mistakes, particularly if innocent, isn’t really consistent with that, nor is it likely to encourage companies to offer benefit plans. On the other hand, just off the top of my head, I have at least two or three cases sitting on my desk right now that revolve around inaccurate or misleading SPDs or other information provided to plan participants, ones that simply did not conform with the governing plan documents themselves. It seems to me that, particularly with plan terms as significant as the ones at issue in Cigna, there really is no reason why an emphasis should not have been put in the first place on making sure that the relevant plan term was communicated accurately and succinctly in the SPD. And that of course brings us all the way around again to one of the obsessive focuses of this blog – that the best way to avoid liability, lawsuits and litigation costs is an obsessive focus on compliance and operational competency in the day to day running of a plan. More – in my experience – than in any other area of the law, when it comes to ERISA governed benefit plans, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

 

 

I have spoken before of the Department of Labor’s regulatory initiatives to target fee setting and disclosure issues, and how they are likely to expand fiduciary liability related to the expenses of 401(k) investment options. Of a piece is the Department of Labor’s yet more recent regulatory initiative to expand the scope of advisors who can qualify as fiduciaries, which, if and when enacted, will by definition expand the number of fiduciaries and the potential number of parties liable for problems in a plan or its investments. Although it comes from Canada by way of New York, I am partial to this blog post on this regulatory change, which covers it quite succinctly.  For a further discussion of the proposed regulatory change, you can see here as well.

I mention this now because, in my view, we have already entered a world of expanding fiduciary liability, and this regulatory change will speed that change. With the change from a pension based system (which had relatively little risk for the individual participant) to a defined contribution plan system (in which all investment risk is borne by the participant), it was only a matter of time before the narrower application of fiduciary liability, ensconced during that earlier era and likely appropriate to it, shifted to accommodate this new reality. We are seeing that occur now, even if often just glacially.

For fiduciaries of defined contribution plans, this means an expansion of their own personal risk, one that in turn demands higher diligence by them in managing plans, selecting investments, and other potentially risky activities. Nevin Adams had a cute post early this week about what fiduciaries of 401(k) plans should know in a nutshell, which you can read here: its particularly apt advice in light of the expanding nature of their potential liability.