Ouch. Here’s a story bashing Wal-Mart for having very high plan fees in its 401(k) plan, and wanting to know why in the world it doesn’t negotiate lower fees when it has some ten billion dollars in assets to use as leverage. I am sure the plaintiffs’ class action bar has the same question. A quick cross reference to BrightScope, by the way, bears out the allegation.

Here’s the original Forbes story on the issue.

In this day and age, whether to avoid bad publicity or to avoid the costs of litigation, there is no reason for plan sponsors not to put in the effort to seek below market, rather than market – or worse – fees, particularly when they have substantial plan assets to use as a cudgel. Even if a court might eventually find that the higher than necessary fees do not add up to a fiduciary breach, why incur the costs of defending against a major lawsuit alleging that plan fees were too high? It has to be cheaper, in terms of both dollars and corporate resources, to invest the time and effort to obtain lower fees on a plan’s investment options. It’s the same old same old, that I talked about here most recently – an obsession on compliance is the best way of avoiding litigation costs and potential legal exposure. From the point of view of a plan sponsor, it may not legally be necessary to drive down plan fees – the law on excessive fee issues is still developing – but an effort to do so can only be beneficial in the long run, by avoiding potential legal costs on the one hand and improving employee morale on the other.

Who knows? The only link between the two subjects that I know of right now is that this blog post is going to touch on both issues.

There are a couple of stories I thought I would pass along today that may be worth reading. In the first, here, I am quoted on climate change litigation and the potential costs to the insurance industry. Personally, I am hard pressed, as a litigator who spends a lot of time dealing with issues related to the admissibility of expert testimony under the current federal court structure, to imagine plaintiffs who are pressing a climate change case ever being able to prove causation, or, for that matter, even being able to submit expert testimony to prove causation. Take one particular hypothetical case, a claim that in essence pollution increased the ocean level and is responsible for some particular piece of coastal property damage. How would you ever prove causation in a federal court between the pollution and the rise in the water level, given the strict standards for admitting expert testimony under current federal law? Or for that matter, even if you could prove that element, how would you ever prove one particular defendant’s factory – or even those of an entire particular industry – was the cause, as opposed to hundreds of millions of automobiles or a million factories in China, just to give two examples? I don’t see the current state of the scientific research being sufficient for a court to allow experts to testify to the elements of causation needed to recover on these types of claims. That said, though, I also don’t think much of the theories used to recover the GNP of a mid-size country from the tobacco industry, but all that took was a couple of courts to give credence to such theories, and you know how that ended up after that. All it would take is one judge somewhere to allow plaintiffs to go forward on these types of claims, and industry – and quickly their insurers – will end up, at a minimum, footing the bill for very large defense costs in response to such cases.

The second story, here, I pass along just because it is fascinating, to anyone who handles long term disability cases or likes statistics, or both. Who knew doctors claimed long term disability at a disproportionate rate?

I talk a lot on these electronic pages about compliance. Its really, from my perspective as a litigator, an ERISA lawyer’s take on the old sports saw that the best defense is a good offense. I often say that, in this economy and this investment market, any problems in the operations of a plan will become grist for a lawsuit, including seemingly minor things that participants – and class action lawyers – would have simply ignored in years past while the markets were only going up, even if they suppressed returns slightly. That’s not the case when the markets take a precipitous fall, and when many participants are finding themselves out of work or forced into retirement with substantially reduced account balances. And so compliance becomes doubly important, as the best defense to the risk posed by litigation. It may or may not prevent getting sued, but strong compliance makes for a strong defense, and for a substantial reduction in the risk of getting hit for a large judgment or settlement.

This is a long lead in to this article here, on ten principles the author identified from a major ERISA conference for protecting plan sponsors and fiduciaries from liability and litigation exposures. They are very much of a piece with the idea of pro-actively protecting oneself by means of compliance. For instance, one of them has to do with watching the fees in investment options, something I have noted frequently in posts addressing how plan sponsors should position themselves going forward in the face of the glut of excessive fee claims.

One point in the article on which I do break ranks a bit from the author is in the tenth point, which discusses the importance of hiring an ERISA lawyer with litigation skills when sued, rather than just a litigator with strong litigation skills. I don’t disagree with the point about needing to hire a lawyer with significant ERISA knowledge, and not just a good litigator who hopes to learn about the subject. That latter option is not a good bet. Most areas of the law can be mastered just fine by a high quality litigator asked to handle a case, but not this one. The courts themselves are in so much disagreement from one circuit to the next – and often from one district court judge to the next in the same circuit – over various issues, and ERISA issues often raise so many subtle points, that it is just not an area that can be well litigated by someone without substantive knowledge, honed over years, of ERISA.

That said, though, it isn’t enough to just hire a good litigator who knows his or her way around ERISA. What you need is a trial lawyer, with a demonstrated record of trying and winning cases before both judges and juries, who is substantively steeped in the law of ERISA. You need it if the case ever gets tried, obviously. But more importantly, you need a trial lawyer leading your team to get the best result period, whether that is by settlement or a resolution on the papers at some point along the way. You can only fight fire with fire in a courtroom, and if the other side is fronted by experienced trial lawyers, you will be at a disadvantage every step of the way – from discovery to settlement discussions to motion practice – if you aren’t as well, in litigating against them. Conversely, if the other side’s team isn’t fronted by an experienced trial lawyer, having your team led by one will put them at a disadvantage, and will substantially increase the odds of getting a result that favors your side.

So therein lies the rub. An ERISA trial lawyer is what you need. But in this day and age, in which so few lawyers try cases anymore – or are trained to do it since most cases they will see settle or head off to arbitration – that’s not the easiest thing to find, although I do know at least one.

Here’s a story worth reading, about a case worth paying attention to, namely the pending First Circuit appeal – argued yesterday – concerning whether a long term disability insurer – namely Unum – engages in false claims when it instructs beneficiaries to also apply for Social Security disability benefits. Simply put, group long term disability plans routinely require participants applying for LTD benefits to also seek social security benefits, if they qualify, and the plans are structured so that the LTD benefits are off set by the amount of social security benefits received. The structure both reduces plan costs – thereby satisfying the overall goal behind ERISA itself of encouraging plan adoption – and ensures that plan participants receive – when they are entitled to them – benefits under a social security system they have been paying into for years. There is nothing wrong with this system, although in its implementation there will be circumstances in which the implementation and enforcement of the offset can have a negative short term impact on a plan participant, due to the reduction in LTD benefits from what was paid prior to the award of social security benefits. But it is a workable coordination of the two benefit systems, one that has been in place for many years. Whatever the merits of this particular case, its certainly one that presents a need to avoid tossing the baby out with the bath water, and derailing this long standing benefit plan structure.

I have posted in the past about how everything eventually makes its way through the insurance industry, in terms of any types of new lawsuits or liability theories, and as this article makes clear, litigation over climate change will be no different. The suits are coming, and while their viability is yet to be determined, they will pose challenges for the insurance industry, because the development of theories of liability in this area will eventually lead to demands for insurance carriers to cover the defense costs or liabilities arising from those theories, just as occurred with asbestos and pollution, and almost certainly with the same types of pitched battles over the existence of coverage as occurred in those areas. This will raise a whole host of issues for carriers that will mimic the types of issues that played out with regard to the large scale – and often unanticipated – exposure posed by environmental litigation and asbestos, only on a broader and probably even more complicated level. Just think, for instance, about how difficult it will be to develop exclusions against climate change lawsuits, if that is the direction insurers elect to go, that are broad enough to encompass the as yet unknown range of legal theories, while still being concise enough in their wording to avoid being declared ambiguous.

Honestly, I have spent a week scratching my head, off and on, over the Supreme Court granting cert to consider the standards governing when attorneys fees can be awarded in an ERISA case, particularly when they denied cert shortly thereafter in Hecker, which presented the opportunity to address the much more substantive issue of the scope of fiduciary responsibility for the amount – and corresponding degree of disclosure – of 401(k) fees. In my mind, there is already a conflict among the circuits over that issue, with the Seventh Circuit finding outright that there was no viable theory against fiduciaries of large plans with market standard fees, and the Eighth finding this same theory worthy of factual inquiry. However, as I thought more on it, the denial of cert for Hecker makes some jurisprudential sense. Hecker itself was decided on a motion to dismiss, leaving essentially no factual record for evaluating these types of claims (critics will say, of course, that this didn’t stop the Seventh Circuit from deciding the theory had no merit) and forcing any Supreme Court ruling to turn solely on the allegations in the pleadings. This is a complicated issue, one I have said before would have been more properly evaluated by the Seventh Circuit after factual development, and I suppose it is likewise fair to say that a Supreme Court review of the issues posed by Hecker by means of reviewing Hecker itself would have suffered from the same flaw; Supreme Court review of the fee issues raised by the Hecker line of cases is probably better suited to a case that has played out sufficiently to allow all of the factual and legal fault lines to develop prior to Supreme Court review.

But the attorneys fee case itself still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, as a practicing litigator who spends plenty of time with cases pending in the federal courts that are governed by that fee statute. The reality is that such attorney fee awards are either subsumed within settlements, or the courts award them under current standards only, typically, where there is significant merit to a party’s position and the party obtains significant relief; the district court judges, in my experience, do a good job of utilizing the current standards and understanding of the fee shifting provision of the statute to bring about that result, such as in this case here. And at the end of the day, no matter certain peculiarities that exist in the wording of the statute, this is really the only standard for awarding or not awarding fees that makes practical sense in the real world. After all, do we really want attorneys fees awarded for less than obtaining at least a significant portion of the relief sought by a plan participant?

I understand that the Fourth Circuit, in the case under review, applied a somewhat more stringent test than what I am discussing here, but, from a courtroom level view, courts get this issue right often enough that it doesn’t seem to warrant Supreme Court intervention. But the Court seems to have a thing for ERISA cases these days, for whatever reason.

Alright, here we go on Conkright v. Frommert, which will be argued at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. SCOTUS has the full run down of the case and what is at issue right here, and long time ERISA blogger Paul Secunda has an amici brief before the Court on the core issue, which can be found here. At its heart, the case presents one fundamental question, though cloaked – like many ERISA cases – in a wide ranging and complicated documentary, factual, and judicial history. That, by the way, is what makes ERISA cases fun for litigators like me – nothing is ever simple, even the issues that one would think should be. This is a natural outcropping from a number of aspects of this area of the law, running from a complicated statute that leaves much to further development by the courts, to the inherent limitations posed by both the English language and the (inevitably finite) skill of the scrivener in drafting complicated benefit plans, to the frequent disagreement among circuits (and even among district court judges within the same circuit in some instances) on a variety of issues under the statute. Here though, the key issue is one of deference, and whether a court must continue to apply deferential review to a plan administrator’s interpretation of a plan when the court has already rejected the administrator’s earlier interpretation as being arbitrary and capricious. A non-lawyer – and most lawyers too – would say the case is simply about whether the plan administrator only gets one bite at the apple, or perhaps is about whether its one strike and you are out.

This case continues a recent trend of the Court taking on ERISA cases that pose very finite issues, ones that aren’t likely to recur frequently but that pose the opportunity to present some sense of what are the outer guidelines of ERISA litigation – how broad is deference, does it apply when there is a conflict, what kind of conflict matters, how much room does the administrator get to work with plan language, and what is the proper balance between the plan administrator and the district courts (and eventually the circuit courts) in deciding factual and plan language issues in ERISA cases. Much of this goes back to Firestone, and the universe governing ERISA cases that it spawned; if I had my guess, I think the Court would like to have that one back, and start all over again with a cleaner, more easily applied legal structure. But they can’t go back, and I don’t think anyone believes they will go so far as to overturn that ruling and start anew with a new framework. So what we will have instead is cases like this one being decided in a manner intended to reign in the outer limits of the universe spawned by Firestone (ouch, that extended “Firestone as the Big Bang” metaphor is beginning to make my head hurt), which means I call this one for the participants, with a finding that the plan administrator gets deference only the first time around.

And yes, I know I am dramatically simplifying how the parties frame the questions here – but what I have said above will be the essence of the outcome.

Here’s a very interesting article from the Financial Times on the Deere/Wal-Mart line of 401(k) suits, in which class actions are being brought on behalf of plan participants alleging that fees in the plans at issue were too high and insufficiently disclosed. I have discussed in other blog posts the essentially diametrically opposed results in Hecker and in Wal-Mart, with one circuit essentially finding no merit to the underlying legal theory, and the other deeming it viable and worthy of further fact finding to determine whether fiduciary breaches had in fact occurred. Me, personally, I think the theory, independent of actual facts of any given case, is viable and has merit. I don’t think, though, that the fiduciary obligations require the particular plans to have the lowest possible fees, but rather require reasonable fees under all the circumstances, along with a realistic and reasonably aggressive process to obtain lower fees than smaller companies or the consumer off the street would have ended up with, this later point being something which the opinion in Hecker did not require.

Factually, though, I thought it would be fun to combine two of my favorite hobby horses – the Hecker theory of fiduciary liability and BrightScope ratings – in light of the Financial Times article, and see what we learn. Interestingly, it is in Wal-Mart that the Eighth Circuit let this line of attack on 401(k) fees proceed, but we learn from the BrightScope ratings on Wal-Mart’s 401(k) plan that it has low fees in comparison to other companies. John Deere’s plan, at issue in the Hecker case, isn’t rated yet on the BrightScope site. Two other large companies identified in the Financial Times article as being the target of such suits, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are both rated as likewise having low total fees. The same can be said of Caterpillar, which just settled such a suit. ABB Inc., which the article identifies as proceeding to trial as we write on just such a claim, doesn’t score as well as those other companies in this regard, but is rated as having low fees.

Now, long time readers know that I am quick to quote (especially when the other side on one of my cases has a statistician for an expert witness) the old line that there are three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies and statistics – and certainly there are subtle points to be made about the comparison between what the plaintiffs are claiming against those various companies and what the BrightScope ratings on fees tell us. This, though, isn’t the place to fully vet those points. What is clear, though, is that easily accessible data – for us, anyway, but surely not for the folks at BrightScope when they went through the work of getting it – suggests there is a pretty good disjunct on a macro level between the theories being crafted by participants’ lawyers in this particular area and the factual reality of the operation of many of the plans that are being targeted.

I have posted frequently on BrightScope and their work in rating 401k plans, and in particular about their decision to rate them in a Zillow like manner that can be quickly understood by employees. Here’s a terrific article out of BusinessWeek on the site, and on the people behind it. Its an excellent way to wile away the end of a workweek.

I just noticed I haven’t posted since last year, for a few weeks to be more accurate, due to the usual end of the year crunch and a briefing schedule in a case overlaid on top of that to boot. No matter the reason, it runs afoul of my general feeling that you shouldn’t host a blog if you are not going to post frequently. In any event, Paul Secunda, over at Workplace Prof, has given me an easy reentry into posting, with his post here on the Seventh Circuit – the Seventh Circuit! – overturning a denial of short term disability benefits in a case where the administrator had been cloaked with discretionary authority. The interesting thing, to me anyway, about the ruling is that the court focused on certain minute details of the administrator’s handling and the precise details of the medical review relied on by the administrator, finding that a flaw in the medical review warranted overturning the denial. This is much different than what, for many years, has been the essence of judicial review of benefit denials where the arbitrary and capricious standard of review is applied, in which the courts essentially just looked to see if there was some medical evidence in the record that could justify the decision and, if so, affirmed the decision by the administrator. What you see in the Seventh Circuit decision is something different, and something more and more apparent in rulings over the past year or two, namely a closer look behind that evidence by the judicial body before whom the case is pending, to see not just – as was traditionally the case – whether there is evidence to support the administrator’s determination, but to instead test the quality of that evidence, followed by a decision as to whether the evidence is of a sufficient quality, and not just quantity, to support the administrator’s decision. If you think about it, that is tending more and more towards de novo review, to a certain extent, just under a different name.