Are you, or have you ever been, a fiduciary? Sometimes I am tempted to open a deposition with exactly that question, phrased as a derivation of the famous McCarthy era line. While I doubt I ever would do it, it’s the million dollar question in most breach of fiduciary duty litigation under ERISA. It is so often outcome determinative, that many cases go away after a ruling on that threshold issue (whether by dismissal if the answer is no, or settlement if the answer is yes), without anyone ever tackling the question of whether imprudent conduct that fell below the fiduciary standard of care ever actually occurred.

That’s a long lead in to this interesting article published by BNA, in which I am interviewed, on the role of attorneys and whether they can become fiduciaries to the benefit plans with which they work. Lawyers who are in essence working in the traditional role of outside advisors to plans and their sponsors really shouldn’t be deemed fiduciaries, but one can envision, at least in theory, an attorney crossing the line and taking on decision making authority that rightly belongs to plan fiduciaries in a manner that could give traction to a claim that the attorney was, in fact, a fiduciary.

On a side note, I know creating content isn’t cheap, so thanks are due to BNA for freely allowing me to republish the article here.

This is a little item about a large award of attorney’s fees in an ERISA case to a prevailing plaintiff in a case involving only several hundred dollars in actual recovered damages, but it caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Factually, as the story goes, the court awarded some $45,000 in attorney’s fees in a case in which the claimant recovered just over $600, raising the issue of whether the fee award was too disproportionate to the recovery to be justified. Even speaking predominately as a defense lawyer, I don’t think there is any problem with the large gap between the fee and the recovery, nor do I think that proportionality is an appropriate consideration to graft onto the standard for determining fee awards in these types of situations. To be more nuanced, if proportionality is an appropriate consideration for a fee award, then the level at which fees become deemed disproportionate must be a lot higher than in the case at hand; I can foresee the immediate objection as to whether an award of $450,000 to recover a few hundred dollars is too disproportionate, and the answer to that question would probably be yes. However, it is worth noting that in that hypothetical situation, the more salient question is not proportionality, but value of the legal services – it is simply unrealistic to belief that the legal work needed to bring about such a recovery costs or should cost that much. That is not something that is true of $45,000 of legal work to recover an award – of however much – on an ERISA claim; that doesn’t seem out of line with the work needed to win such a case under many typical circumstances.

But proportionality itself is not an appropriate factor, nor an appropriate lens through which to view this issue. To an individual plan participant, a 5, 10 or 15 thousand dollar recovery of additional benefits can be a very significant recovery, one absolutely worth fighting for, but the legal work needed to recover that will almost always cost significantly more. The very purpose of shifting fees under ERISA on participant claims is to allow for that dynamic, and ensure that participants can recover unpaid benefits, even where the cost of suing would exceed the value of the benefits at issue. Worrying about the proportionality of the legal fees to the recovery, under most normal scenarios, undermines that, because in many typical situations, the fees needed to recover the amounts at issue can often exceed the value of the benefits if the participant must litigate the issue to a conclusion to recover the benefits.

The other reason the story caught my eye is that, at the end of the day, the dispute over the several hundred dollars was a dispute between two lawyers who had formerly worked together, and the litigation appears to have been very contentious. Its unclear to me from the story whether the cause of that excessive contentiousness – given the amounts actually at stake – was personal or work related enmity, or simply what inevitably happens when two lawyers sue each other. From a broader perspective, however, it is worth noting that you see similar dynamics time and again with small plans run by small businesses, in which there is often a great deal of informality with regard to benefit plans, leading to highly contentious litigation – often personal in nature – over one partner’s handling of the benefit plan, once the business comes to an end. Compliance, structure, outside management of a plan – all the things that one would hope would be in place and which could diffuse such strife are often missing in that scenario, resulting in ERISA litigation that would never have arisen in a bigger operation with more controls.

I often explain to people that as a litigator, I am typically presented with a knotty, tied up problem, consisting of all the decisions and plan choices that have been made in the past that eventually resulted in litigation, and that I then have to unravel the knot into its constituent pieces, which can then be used to defend the decisions that led to the knotty problem (if I am defending the case) or to attack the decisions that created the knot (if I am instead representing a plaintiff, whether a plan participant or a plan sponsor or other fiduciary). This is a much different perspective on plans and their design and development than that of those who assemble plans, who look at things in a more prospective manner, from the vantage point of the one developing the world from scratch. In essence, their view is the mirror image of mine, as they look at all the independent strands of a plan and assemble them into what, eventually, will become the knot that I get charged with unraveling in litigation.

That more prospective view comes through in Adam Pozek’s excellent post yesterday on the difference between different types of fiduciary advisors to plans, and how to select them, as well as in the excellent source article on section 3(38) and section 3(21) advisors he references. Adam presents a typical scenario of a plan sponsor trying to work through the issues of how to use such advisors, when to use each kind, and the factors to be considered in making such a decision. To someone like me who normally only sees those types of transactions in the rear view mirror, as they are recounted for purposes of litigation (such as in a deposition), it is very interesting to read a presentation of the decision making and the transaction back at the start of the whole process.

This is interesting. I have written before on this blog, on numerous occasions, about courts sometimes engaging in a more searching level of discretionary review that, in essence, is not discretionary review at all, at least in the manner it has long been traditionally understood. The common belief, and applied in that way by many and probably most courts over the years, is that discretionary – sometimes called arbitrary and capricious – review means that an administrator’s decision in a long term disability case must be upheld if there is significant medical evidence in the administrative record to support the administrator’s determination, and that the process of weighing the different pieces of evidence in the medical record – much of which may be conflicting – belongs to the administrator; the court, applying this type of review, is normally understood to not engage in its own independent weighing of that evidence. Actually looking into and weighing that conflicting evidence to decide whether the administrator was correct was traditionally understood to be part of de novo review, not discretionary review.

However, as I have commented in the past, court decisions in this area reflect a subtle shift away from granting that much discretion to the administrator and towards analyzing the credibility and weight of the evidence supporting the administrator’s decision, even as part of discretionary review. Essentially, while applying discretionary review, some courts have begun to look more closely at the evidence to decide whether to uphold the administrator’s decision, finding that the decision is arbitrary if the court disagrees with the administrator over the value of or weight to be given to certain aspects of the administrative record. It’s a gradual and subtle shift in jurisprudence, but one that exists and that can change the outcome of a long term disability case, by affecting exactly how the court reviews the record and the administrator’s decision. The developing jurisprudence over structural conflicts of interest has provided still greater impetus to, and opportunities for, this shift.

Roy Harmon at his always excellent Health Plan Law blog had a perfect example of this in a post yesterday, concerning a Ninth Circuit ruling in which the appeals court looked behind the medical evidence to weigh it in deciding a long term disability case, finding that the evidence, looked at closely, did not support the administrator’s determination. In contrast, though, you can see in that same case how the district court applied a more traditional understanding of discretionary review, which does not involve independently analyzing the evidence in that manner, to find that the administrator’s decision was not arbitrary and capricious since it was supported by substantial evidence in the administrative record. The end result is that you can compare in this case the effect on the same facts of these two different approaches to applying discretionary review, with the more traditional view of it – applied by the district court – resulting in a win for the administrator – and the more searching and activist approach – applied by the Ninth Circuit – resulting in a win by the participant.

Wow. When I saw this article about the questionable investment assumptions and increasingly risky investment choices being pursued by public pension plans, the first thing that jumped into my head was the old Yogi Berra line that “in baseball, you don’t know nothing." It seems to hold true for at least some of those running the public pension plans profiled in the article. The article details how public pension plans, in order to deal with (I would say paper over) an ever increasing gap between their assets and their obligations, are increasing their exposure to ever more risky investments at the same time that the best run private pension funds are reducing theirs. My second thought, in reading the techniques, assumptions and reasoning of the public pension funds being profiled – in particular the reliance of some of them on assumed future returns in excess of anything the funds have actually been garnering – is that if these were instead the fiduciaries of private pension plans, they would be staring at breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits right now.

For a long while, many have been sounding the alarm that many public pension plans cannot possibly meet the benefit obligations that state and municipal governments have committed them to satisfy, and this article doesn’t suggest otherwise. As many have argued, this can only mean, eventually, a taxpayer bailout of one form or another, whether it is in the form of large increases in tax revenue contributed to the plans or in the form of taxes to pay out the promised benefits to the beneficiaries down the road. Playing connect the dots a little bit, I couldn’t help but think of the Washington Post Company’s Robert Samuelson’s depiction of the youngest generation in the current workforce as being the “chump” generation, who will end up paying for all of these promised benefits down the road, reducing their long term quality of life to pay off the underfunded promises made to generations that preceded them.
 

Well now, I think this is exactly what I said in this post here, as well as elsewhere on this blog in the past. Global warming litigation is heating up (pretty funny pun, huh?), litigation costs from the defense of those cases pose a significant threat to the insurance industry, and insurance coverage litigation to sort out coverage for those costs is bound to follow on the heels of such global warming cases. This story that popped up in my in-box today does, however, provide the most systematic overview of these points that I have seen to date. It’s a particularly provocative read right now, as I look out my window here in Boston at temperatures in the mid-forties and sunshine, even though its still just the beginning of March.

I have been wanting to post about the decision early last month in In re Lehman Brothers ERISA Litigation, in which the Southern District of New York dismissed ERISA stock drop claims against a number of officers and a named fiduciary, but, as it turns out, I have been too busy using the decision for my own purposes in my own practice to find time to post about it. Well, all that changes today, driven in part by this client advisory memorandum from Shearman & Sterling on the decision, which provides an excellent overview of the decision. The interesting thing to me about the memo, and its interaction with the decision itself, is the memo’s focus on the named fiduciary being exonerated on the basis of the famous – or infamous, depending on which side of the bar you sit on – Moench presumption. There is much to be said about the Moench presumption, and when it is appropriate to apply it or not apply it, including both the question of whether this single Third Circuit decision should have been allowed to morph into the de facto standard applied across the board in many circuits and district courts to an often somewhat disparate series of factual scenarios, and the issue of whether its sweeping acceptance should be understood as reflecting a judicial predisposition against allowing ERISA to be turned into an easier to plead version of securities class action litigation. I am not going to talk about all of that today, and neither did the Shearman & Sterling memo. What I am going to talk about is a particular point in the Lehman Brothers decision that is less the focus of the Shearman & Sterling memo, but, in many ways, of more significance to the day in, day out practice of handling disputes over ERISA plans, which is the status of company officers and directors. If there has been one consistent bone of contention between defense lawyers and lawyers who represent participants – whether individually or as a class – it has been the question of whether lumping in the directors and officers of the company sponsoring a plan as defendants, based solely on that capacity (or, more often, that capacity with just a little window dressing added on top) is appropriate. Lehman Brothers answers that in an authoritative voice, pointing out that such directors and officers do not become fiduciaries solely by means of that status, and further cannot be sued as fiduciaries based on the additional allegation that they had some authority to select those who made plan decisions unless they are being sued for mistakes stemming directly from taking action in that regard. Too often, lawsuits treat the directors and officers as additional deep pockets who should be named as defendants, but as Lehman Brothers points out, such individuals do not belong in the case unless they actually exercised operative control over an aspect of the plan that allegedly went awry and are being sued for that exact aspect of the plan’s operations.

For reasons too obscure and uninteresting to mention, I have had almost nothing to do with the cable tv industry since, well, it was invented. What’s a DVR, anyway, and why would I want one? But yesterday, I had to obtain digital cable from my local cable company, and called them, braced to be gouged. Instead, I was offered a special deal for a year, much less than I was expecting to pay, with stuff I would never pay for thrown in. A few hours later, of course, the reason occurred to me. The cable monopoly I recall from my youth is not what I was dealing with, and I was instead talking to a cable company that had competition from dishes – Dish.com, I guess? – and the local telephone/internet/cable company, so instead of gouging me, they had to offer me a deal they figured would keep me as a customer. Classic economic, legal and antitrust theory holds that there are really just two ways to police pricing – competition or, in its absence, regulation. Competition, of course, is why I got my sweet deal on cable yesterday.

So what does this have to do with the topics of this blog? Seems like plenty, in that it is the absence of above board open competition that is at the root of much of the problems discussed in these pages concerning ERISA governed plans. I have discussed in many posts that the problem with health insurance coverage through employers has much less to do with the question of whether employers want to provide it than it has to do with the ever escalating cost of health insurance and the fact that providing health insurance is a punishing cost. Employers, in my view, are unfairly demonized as trying to avoid providing health insurance, but it is the cost that is driving their increasing balkiness about being, as I have described it in other posts, unofficially deputized as the providers of health insurance in this country. From where I sit, one of the fundamental problems with acts mandating health insurance provision or payments by employers is that they don’t account for this, either by reducing health insurance costs or by recognizing the business costs imposed by these types of statutes. Does anybody really think that the restaurants targeted by the San Francisco statute are swimming in profits? This article here, profiled on the Workplace Prof blog, describes this exact concern about costs as the driving force behind employer, and particularly small employer, health insurance decisions.

And perhaps one solution to the problem of the cost of providing health insurance – perhaps the most important one – is that what is good for the cable industry should also be sauce for the gander, i.e., much greater competition among, and significantly less market control by, health insurers, as pointed out in this op-ed piece here by Robert Reich (when even the archetype liberals are arguing that market competition is the answer to all evils, you know the world has turned upside down).

And the same thought continues across to 401(k) plans, and the ongoing issue of fees and costs in investment options, and how they are disclosed. What if, instead of arguing after the fact about whether the fees in a particular plan were too high, prudent fiduciary practices were deemed to require a competitive process for selecting investment options, in a manner forcing putative vendors to put their lowest cost options forward to win the business? Isn’t that what all the complaining about large asset plans that don’t use their size to win better pricing is about, after all? Instead of just complaining in the abstract that plan sponsors should have acted that way, or engaging in after the fact litigation to try to police how much should have been charged in fees, wouldn’t it make more sense to just require a fully competitive process among vendors for selecting investment options, conducted by fiduciaries – or their delegates – who have the knowledge base to understand the pricing structure of the proposed options?

In that version of the world, it would be a fiduciary obligation to impose a fully competitive, open call for investment options, and to select the best – including on fees, costs, disclosure and performance – from among them, with it being a fiduciary breach for failing to pursue this process (rather than it being a fiduciary breach for ending up with fees that are too high). The focus would return in this way to fiduciary practice, both in terms of judging conduct as meeting or failing to meet the standards of a fiduciary and in terms of whether to impose liability, rather than on an after the fact, necessarily subjective evaluation of the amount of fees, costs, or disclosure in a particular plan that resulted from the fiduciary’s decisions.

Open competition would certainly drive down the fees and costs in plans, while simultaneously giving fiduciaries a clear standard – namely their obligation to decide on the basis of such competition – against which to work. I can’t help but think that, like the cable customer, plan participants will end up with better and cheaper products to pick from, while plans – and their insurers – will spend substantially less on litigation costs.