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.

Here’s a great story on the latest developments in the breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit arising out of the use of the Tribune’s ESOP assets as part of a complicated leveraged buy out. For some really deep background on this case, you can check out my post here from when the case commenced. I have been following it with one eye since it began, and think the summary in this newspaper article is pretty well-balanced. To the extent that there is a broader, more macro/forest and not the trees lesson here, it is the importance of thinking of ESOP holdings in the same way that a company would think of its employees’ 401(k) or other defined contribution holdings, and to both protect and respect them as retirement assets of plan participants. Unfortunately, the fact that ESOP accounts hold employer stock can make them instead appear to be another potential tool of corporate finance. The Tribune case reflects the fact that making use of that stock for transactional purposes can well end up, in at least the outlier cases, with large losses to plan participants, after which the class action bar or the Department of Labor are likely to try to transfer those losses to one or more of the parties involved in the transaction.
 

I wanted to say that much ink has been spilled over the Department of Labor’s regulatory initiatives concerning fee disclosure, but no one really uses ink anymore, and we all just post on the internet, in either blogs or in intermediary sites that publish law firm client advisories. Either way, though, there is no getting around the tsunami of reporting on the fee initiatives, much of which is quite good. That said, for those of you who don’t feel overwhelmed by the amount of information out there on this subject or, on the other end of the spectrum, are not yet comfortable with the impact of the regulations, I liked this publication here for an easy to digest summary on the issue. Beyond that, Josh Itzoe, author of Fixing the 401(k), is offering this webinar on the subject on a few occasions over the next several weeks.

I have always wanted to write another blog about trial tactics and litigation strategy, and call it Percentage Players Die Broke Too, after the famous line by Paul Newman in the world’s finest film, The Hustler (that’s the first one, mind you, not the embarrassing sequel they did with Tom Cruise many decades later). For now, though, I am going to settle on adding a new subheading to the digressions section of this blog, titled “Percentage Players Die Broke Too: Notes on Litigation and Trial Tactics.”

And the very first entry in that section is a link to this excellent post here, by North Carolina business litigator Mack Sperling, about upcoming changes to the federal rules that are intended to end one of my favorite pieces of federal court gamesmanship, the discovery of communications between experts and the lawyers who retain them, as well as of draft versions of expert reports. For awhile there, before everyone caught on, you could get ahold of such material, which could often be of great help in impeaching an opposing expert, simply because opposing lawyers mistakenly believed that they could engage in such communications and have drafts of reports revised under the cloak of privilege. They could not do so, in fact, and nothing was more fun that seeing the face of opposing counsel when they learned this.

In truth, over the last few years, it has become rarer and rarer to find opposing counsel who walked into this trap, and it was more a question of whether a particular expert prepared drafts that contradicted his or her final report without realizing the earlier draft might be discoverable.

Nonetheless, as the author points out, those days are gone forever. I should just let them go.

As a general rule, I don’t write blog posts about cases I am handling. For the most part, nothing good can come of it. I do make an exception once and awhile, but only to the extent of passing along a particular ruling, without commentary, that may be of broader relevance and interest. Today is one of those days, in which I am posting this recent federal district court decision from one of my cases which concerns class certification related to a 401(k) dispute, and I post it only because the Court provides a nice synopsis of one particular wrinkle raised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue, namely its impact, if any, on the propriety of certifying a class in a dispute involving a defined contribution plan. In the words of the Court:

There is a question whether the Supreme Court’s decision in LaRue v. DeWolff,
Boberg & Assoc., Inc., 552 U.S. 248 (2008), bars class certification of fiduciary breach claims by participants in defined contribution plans because participants as a result of LaRue’s holding may now pursue individual ERISA actions against plan fiduciaries. Although some courts have so held, see, e.g., In re First Am. Corp. ERISA Litig., 622 (C.D.Cal. 2009), other courts, including this one, have not been persuaded that so radical a revision of Rule 23 was intended by the Supreme Court. See Hochstadt v. Boston Scientific Corp., 2010 WL 1704003 at *12 n.12 (D. Mass. Apr. 27, 2010); see also Stanford v. Foamex L.P., 263 F.R.D. 156, 174 (E.D. Pa. 2009) (“The availability of an individual account claim under § 502(a)(2) [of ERISA] does not alleviate the concerns cited by numerous courts that have certified ERISA class actions pursuant to Rule 23(b)(1)(B) in situations where claims on behalf of the Plan are identical to those on behalf of an individual account.”).

 

You can find the discussion at footnote 4.

 

Investment option fees are the current bête noire of 401(k) plans, but to date the government response to them has not been a direct attack on the amount of fees themselves, in the form of regulatory or legislative establishment of appropriate ranges of fees. This differs, for instance, from the manner in which the government has effectuated health care reform, where the new regulatory structure is built around establishing and dictating exact manners of compliance. In contrast, with 401(k) fees, the government response, as formulated through regulatory initiatives, is to increase transparency, as Ryan Alfred of BrightScope discusses in this insightful post, presumably in the belief that greater transparency will lead to greater pressure to reduce fees. At a minimum, one would expect broad knowledge of the fees that are part of different investment options to increase competition, as plan participants and fiduciaries seek lower fees for their own reasons when confronted with this information, and the providers respond to that pressure by competing more on price. That, in any event, would seem to be the theory.

Will it work? Probably, would be my guess, although obviously if we give it a little time, someone will be able to give us quantitative evidence at some point as to whether or not this approach succeeded in bringing down fees. But looking prospectively, rather than in hindsight, it only makes logical sense that it would. That relatively small subset of participants who understand the impact of fees on their 401(k) plans can be expected to press for lower fee options, and fiduciaries can in turn be expected to respond by seeking such options, if for no other reason than to reduce the risk of getting sued down the road by disgruntled participants; in this way, the self-interest of the key set of players on the buy side ought to reduce plan fees, as providers respond to this pressure by competing on price. Maybe that’s a little too “invisible hand of the market” for some people, and that may not be the answer to all problems everywhere, but it seems a nice logical outcome in this instance.

Moreover, it is likely to work here because the use of transparency to bring about lower fees is not occurring in a vacuum, but instead is reinforced by the private attorney general aspect of ERISA litigation, in which participant classes and individual participant plaintiffs simultaneously pressure fiduciaries to reduce fees or risk paying out a small fortune in defense costs and settlement money if they don’t, as this story about a recent settlement over fee disputes entered into by Bechtel reflects. Greater transparency combined with increased risks of liability for failing to act on fees seems like a pretty potent combination, and a sensible way to try to bring down fees without simultaneously hemming in fiduciaries and their vendors by dictating exact fee ranges.