I was going to post on something else today – namely the scope of contractual obligation clauses in insurance policies – but my Google Alert pulled in something else that I wanted to pass along first instead, namely, this post by Paul Secunda at Marquette on an amicus brief filed by several law professors asking the Seventh Circuit to reconsider Hecker v. Deere en banc. The brief asks the Seventh Circuit to consider the exact issues that I noted in my post on Hecker as being the debatable parts of the decision, namely the panel’s decision to link a very narrow interpretation of fiduciary obligations with a very broad interpretation of the 404(c) safe harbor. I am very curious to watch how the panel’s analysis of those issues gets played out as the case law develops on excessive fee issues, 401(k) plans, and the application to them of the safe harbor and of breach of fiduciary duty claims, whether that takes place in the courts of other circuits who are confronted by the Hecker decision, or in an en banc revisiting of the issues by the Seventh Circuit.

Fun stuff, either way.

There is an interesting twist to a recent Seventh Circuit decision, Leger v. Tribune Company Long Term Disability Plan. The decision starts out as an attempt by the participant to resuscitate her benefits claim by invoking Glenn v. MetLife and asserting that a structural conflict of interest existed warranting an alteration to the standard of review. The Seventh Circuit, though, quickly rejected that position, finding that there wasn’t even a conflict of a level that warranted being considered as a factor in conducting an arbitrary and capricious standard of review. Uh oh, says the reader, we know how this story ends: the conflict of interest argument in this context signifies in most decisions that the participant has no other hook to hang her claim on, and is taking her last, desperate shot, dooming her when, as in this opinion, the court summarily rejects the argument. But the Seventh Circuit surprises here, as this issue is not the last one addressed, but is instead simply a signpost along the way to the ultimate conclusion and to the application by the court of what, in most cases, is not an approach one sees taken. Rather than stopping with the standard analysis that, one, the conflict of interest doesn’t change anything, and, two, there is reasonable support in the record for the decision to terminate benefits, thus ending the case, the court continued from there, finding, instead, that the decision, despite having support in the record, failed to account for numerous conflicting pieces of evidence contained in the administrative record or possible interpretations justified by the record. The court held that the decision to terminate could not be sustained in that circumstance, and that, instead, the issue had to go back to the administrator for purposes of making a decision that did, in fact, take all such concerns into account (the court actually just remanded it to the district court for proceedings consistent with its ruling, but one presumes this would mean remanding it back to the administrator to address these issues, followed by litigating the issues all over again).

I have commented in the past on this point – the question of courts applying a more searching level of review while nominally still proceeding under the arbitrary and capricious standard of review is much more significant both to parties and to the development of the law in this area than is the question of whether conflicts exist, and if so their impact.
 

Readers of this blog have undoubtedly picked up on the fact that I like to litigate cases (even more to try them), and that the focus of my practice, including with regard to ERISA governed plans, is litigating disputes. But there are probably far more benefit plan attorneys whose focus is on keeping people out of litigation in the first place, by keeping plans and their operations in line with statutory and regulatory mandates. I just recently came across an excellent new blog both by and for exactly those lawyers, and you can find it right here.

If it’s a pleasure to read a piece by someone who gets it, whatever the it may be, it’s even better when that same person can explain it successfully to others. In this case the “it” is how in-house counsel responsible for ERISA governed benefit plans should conduct their oversight of the plans, and the someone is American Airlines’ Vicki D. Blanton, who has that exact responsibility at her company. She has written an excellent “how to” piece for in-house counsel who are charged with those responsibilities, and you can find it right here.

The Seventh Circuit’s opinion in Hecker v Deere is interesting in a number of ways, and on a number of levels. I won’t detail the facts of the case in depth here, but the case turns on the question of the plan sponsor’s and service providers’ potential fiduciary liability for allegedly high fees in the mutual funds offered in a 401(k) plan and the limited degree of disclosure provided to participants about the fees. You can find the case itself here, and for those of you who don’t have an interest – or possibly the time – in reading the entire 33 page opinion, a readers digest overview of the case itself right here. It is, though, a well-written, fluid, almost elegant opinion, an easy read if you care to take the time.

Perhaps most notable, from an overview perspective, is the fact that the Seventh Circuit simultaneously gave the scope of protection granted to fiduciaries by Section 404(c) pretty much as broad an interpretation as possible, and the scope of fiduciary obligations with regard to investment selection and fee disclosure as narrow a one as possible. Its an interesting double whammy. I am not saying its right or wrong (although Ryan Alfred at BrightScope has made a detailed argument that the court is off base in reading the protections of section 404(c) so broadly), but it is certainly a very interesting framework. If you think of it as a Ven diagram, with one circle the world of problems that can arise with mutual funds and 401(k) plans, and the other the extent of fiduciary obligations in the view of the Seventh Circuit, the overlap is smaller than one would have anticipated.

Then there is the question of the court’s view of the fiduciaries’ obligations of disclosure with regard to fees in the plan, finding that the statute and the regulations did not require more disclosure than was made, and thus there was no breach in failing to disclose more information about the fee structure. Paul Secunda in his piece on the intersection of preemption and the statute’s limited remedies (in which he emphasizes how those two aspects of ERISA can result in harms that cannot be remedied) discusses what he views as two competing ideological camps with regard to the interpretation of ERISA, literalists and remedialists. I don’t fully agree with this particular bicameral division of the world, but it offers a handy frame of reference for understanding the Seventh Circuit’s ruling: the panel took a truly literalist approach to the question of disclosure, finding that what the statute and regulations don’t expressly require, is not required. This seems, I have to say, hard to square with the idea that a fiduciary’s obligations run to a high level of care, which would seem to raise the question of whether a fiduciary has more obligations than simply those that are required by express mandates, but the panel does not squarely address that question.

This leads into a central point that animates the case, in my opinion, and which can be summed up in two famous words: caveat emptor, at least if you are the plan participant. The court finds that the mutual funds in the plan are numerous and also sold to the public as a whole, and therefore the fees are, in some broad sense, fair and appropriate, as they are what the public marketplace as a whole is willing to bear. But is the public pricing as a whole a fair determination of whether fees charged within a 401(k) plan are excessive or not? Isn’t this just using the lowest common denominator to make this call? After all, a public buyer does not have the leverage or the expertise – at least in theory – that a plan sponsor brings to negotiating investment options and their fees. Part of the problem in analyzing this question is that the district court, and now the appeals court, resolved the case on a motion to dismiss, where argument and supposition play too much of a role and factual development of these types of questions have not occurred. Deciding whether the fees are excessive on an actual factual record may suggest an entirely different answer than just the assumption that the market as a whole has acquiesced in the pricing, so therefore it was not excessive when a plan sponsor signed off on it. But for a plan participant, the ruling clearly means one thing: it is your responsibility to engage in the same full due diligence that you would have to pursue if you just purchased the mutual fund from a 1-800 number, and you are not entitled to rely on the plan’s fiduciaries to have done that for you.

Still parceling out items of interest that have stacked up on my desk in the last week or so. Among the things I still haven’t gotten to, I have to admit, is a careful reading of the Seventh Circuit’s recent decision in Heckler v John Deere, but I will, shortly. In the meantime, though, the bright guys over at BrightScope have, and their’s is a very interesting take. You can find it right here. Its clear, when you read the post, that they don’t just have the analytics down when it comes to 401(k) plans, but also their structure and the manner in which they operate.
 

A lot of interesting things have piled up in my in-box during the past week and a half or so, when I have not had time to blog. I still think they are interesting, even after a few days of having them underfoot, so I am going to try to parcel out as many of them as possible over the course of this week, until I have either run out of them or out of time, whichever comes first.

I thought, for reasons of both vanity and timeliness, I would start with a couple of items on the Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. DuPont. I am quoted in an article in the current edition of Lawyers USA discussing the case, along with a motley assortment of worthies, including the law professor formerly known as the Workplace Prof. It’s a good article, and for those of you who are subscribers, you can find it here; for those of you who aren’t, I am going to pass on my usual approach of (by putting on my copyright litigator hat) deciding how much of it I can quote under the guise of fair use, and instead send you to my post on the case here, which says pretty much what I think on the subject.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that attorney Albert Feuer was kind enough to send along to me links to a series of papers and commentaries he has written on the Kennedy decision and the issues it raises (and, in many cases, does not answer, in both my and Albert’s views).  You can find them here, here and here.

I love this story. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about BrightScope’s launch, and pointed out my view that more information generally means less litigation. I learned thereafter that some think that is a counter-intuitive thought; presumably, people who believe that think that if you cover up problems and don’t let people know what’s going on, they may not find out and thus may not sue you. The oldest saying in the book, of course, is that the cover up is worse than the crime. Rather, people who are legitimately wronged will sue no matter what, as they should; but people on the margins are more likely to sue if they feel they were not told the truth, than they would be if they feel they were given a fair shake, even if it worked out badly for them. More technically as well, many breach of fiduciary duty claims are based on allegations of non-disclosure – that the sponsors did not disclose problems with the company stock, or backdating, or cdos. etc., that would have changed the participants’ investment strategies had they known. Obviously, something that is disclosed, rather than kept under wraps, cannot be the basis for a breach of fiduciary duty claim based on the failure to disclose.

This thesis, which I maintain is hardly counter-intuitive, but just plan common sense, is borne out beautifully by this story about a long time Merrill Lynch broker who has lost millions of dollars in company stock held in an ESOP. He points out that had he been told the truth and given the opportunity, he would have divested and diversified along the way, but did not, and that he was regularly told things by management that were not true. Now, in the close of the article, he points out that what he needs now are “the services of a sharp labor and ERISA attorney." Had he been told the truth and given the opportunity to move his retirement savings out of company stock in light of information given to him at that time, he may be worse off today than he was before the Wall Street meltdown, but he is likely well enough off still that he isn’t looking for a lawyer to file suit for him.

Paul Secunda, the law professor formerly known as the workplace prof, has a new law review article out on the “wrong without a remedy” aspect of ERISA litigation, which is the fact that the broad scope of preemption can combine with the limited range of remedies available under ERISA in a way that makes some alleged wrongs involving employee benefit plans simply not redressable. Notice that unlike many commentators, including Paul in his article, I call it an aspect of ERISA litigation, rather than a problem, as, contrary to Paul’s article, I am not convinced this isn’t the logical outcome, rather than the problematic distortion, of the original statutory structure. Either way, there is certainly room to argue over whether, and if so what, should be done about this aspect, and Paul provides his own version of changes that could be enacted legislatively or by judicial development to eliminate the “wrong without a remedy” scenario. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his points or his reasoning, but its an interesting read and presents some interesting approaches. Moreover, I am on record – I guess as part of a Greek chorus at this point – with my criticism of legal scholarship that is simply part of a hermetically sealed circle of philosophical commentary, without adding value to practicing attorneys, courts, or the legal system as a whole. Paul’s article avoids this problem, I am happy to report, in two ways, making it something worth recommending as reading to practitioners. The first is that the article provides a highly readable, educational (and cite-able) survey of the historical and current state of the law of preemption. The second is that the article thoughtfully shifts the nature of the discussion of this problem from the general fixation on the preemption prong, which is usually the focus of the discussion in commentary and in litigation, to the remedies part of the problem, posing the idea that preemption is broad enough to preclude adding state law causes of action to benefit plan cases, and that instead the place to look to end the “wrong without a remedy” conundrum, which Paul has called in other places the “grand irony of ERISA,” is to the statutory remedies under ERISA and to whether they can be expanded by judicial development or legislative fiat. In the courtroom, in cases involving the clash between preemption of state court remedies and the limited nature of the relief available under ERISA, the focus tends to be on the scope of preemption; Paul, in his article, posits that it would make more sense to simply start the analysis, and any response to this issue, from the premise of accepting the broad scope of preemption, and then go from there.

The article is titled “Sorry, No Remedy: Intersectionality and the Grand Irony of ERISA,” and can be downloaded here.