There’s an old saying that nothing focuses the mind like an execution date; all trial lawyers have heard judges rephrase it as nothing focuses the mind so much on settlement as an imminent trial date. I thought of this saying when I read this article, in which Susan Mangiero of Pension Governance, whose Cassandra like warnings that companies need to focus on improving quality and other aspects of retirement plans – including their handling of hard to value assets – predates the utter disaster that has befallen such plans in the past several weeks, discusses the fact that, having now fallen into the abyss, pension plans and fiduciaries must focus their efforts on how to respond to the market collapse, which may have a larger impact on the pension plans than the market collapse itself. If there was ever a metaphorical execution date for plan fiduciaries and administrators, it’s the upcoming and ongoing storm of litigation risks, government investigations and intervention, and need to respond to the market volatility by tightening up investment strategies. If it may be hard, in hindsight, to defend the kind of alleged problems in investment management that occurred in the past that are at the heart of the “stock drop” type suits that are being filed against 401(k) and pension plans, it will be doubly hard to defend any continuation of the same types of errors in future cases, given the extent to which the world has changed over the past several weeks, both in terms of the environment in which such cases will be litigated and the expectation that fiduciaries should have learned from past mistakes.

I am a real big fan of this article here, on two recent rulings in major excessive fee 401(k) lawsuits, one against Wal-Mart and the other against Bechtel. While I haven’t read the rulings in those cases themselves yet, what I like about the rulings, at least as depicted in the article, is that they apparently did not focus on the actual amount of the fees, but rather on the process used by the defendant companies in selecting them, to decide whether the amount of fees attached to the plan’s investment options violated fiduciary obligations. As the article sums up the rulings:

The details in the recent rulings in the Wal-Mart and Bechtel suits vary, but both cases offer a reassuring message to large corporate plan sponsors: In determining whether a corporation breached its fiduciary duties to 401(k) participants, the actual fees charged to workers are not nearly as important as the procedure a sponsor has in place supporting its decision to hire, and keep, any firm that provides 401(k) services to plan participants.

So, for instance, if plan sponsors offer actively managed mutual funds on their 401(k) platforms, sponsors are not acting negligently if these funds wind up underperforming—even if the funds are more costly to participants than passive investment options that could have generated better returns for a lower fee. As long as 401(k) sponsors can document that there was sound reasoning and process underlying its selection of the actively managed funds, then they are not breaching their fiduciary responsibilities.

I like this because it is a perfect match for something I have been preaching on this blog for some time, and which is exactly what I tell reporters who call up asking for suggestions as to how plan sponsors and administrators can best protect themselves against fiduciary liability: follow and document best practices that show that the company tried to locate the best funds at the best fees. Sponsors and fiduciaries can do this by such steps as: (1) bench marking selections against other options and the market as a whole; (2) bringing in outside experts who can provide that information; (3) choosing funds whose costs are consistent with the industry and not outliers; and (4) considering multiple vendors, options and choices before settling on the best overall option, just as the company would in picking vendors for any other service or product. What this really means in the real world as to follow, or mimic, an RFP type approach to selecting funds and vendors, and never, ever, just buy funds from someone a fiduciary knows from playing golf.

Stop me if I am beating a dead horse, but this press release/short story on a class action law firm’s investigation into a stock drop involving Hartford’s stock reads exactly like one that, a few years ago, would have been issued prior to pursuing a securities class action; now its written in advance of pursuing an ERISA breach of fiduciary duty claim, with the class consisting of the company’s 401(k) participants. There is no better or more succinct illustration of the movement away from using the securities laws to pursue these types of claims and towards instead using ERISA to pursue these types of claims than this brief story. The facts at issue haven’t changed; they just replaced the words “securities act” with the word “ERISA.”

More grist for the mill for those who believe that the merging of the two areas by plaintiffs’ firms needs to be met by integrating the obligations under both areas of law so that fiduciaries are not operating under two separate and sometimes contradictory legal regimes.

So you’re an amateur fiduciary, nominally in charge of a company’s pension plan or 401(k) plan but generally relying on your outside vendors and service providers for substantive advice and decision making, and you get sued for breach of fiduciary duty because of losses resulting from the investment advice you received from them. So what’s the first thing you do? File third party actions for contribution or indemnity against the outside vendors on the theory they were fiduciaries as well and must reimburse you for any loss you are held responsible for because of your role as a fiduciary? Well, not necessarily in Massachusetts, where at least one judge has now concluded, on an issue that has been treated differently in different courts, that ERISA did not expressly incorporate such rights as against other fiduciaries, and so therefore they do not exist. The case is Charters v. John Hancock, and here is a nice article on it, here is nice post elsewhere on it, and here is the decision itself.

The central issue of the case and of the court’s reasoning is presented well in the article, where the court’s reasoning is explained as follows:

Under the indemnification and contribution principle, when one person is subject to liability because of another person’s action, the second person has to make good the loss, and contribution requires the loss to be distributed among several liable fiduciaries. In his ruling, Groton noted that federal appellate courts are divided on the issue of whether ERISA permits indemnification and contribution, but said Groton was siding with those courts that have found that courts should not imply statutory remedies, which are not allowed under ERISA.

"Here neither party disputes that ERISA does not explicitly provide for claims of contribution and indemnification among co-fiduciaries. Allowing fiduciaries who have breached their duty to resort to contribution and indemnification to recover from co-fiduciaries is not ‘of central concern’ to ERISA," Groton asserted.
 

There is a lot of room for argument on both sides of this issue, as to whether a fiduciary should have or does have such a claim against another fiduciary, and I can certainly see both sides of it, or argue either side of it. It is more of a policy issue as to how ERISA should be applied, than it is a jurisprudence question of understanding and interpreting the statute, and is one that the entire system would benefit from a simple declaration one way or the other, by Congress or the Supreme Court, as to what the rule shall be on this going forward.

In the Charters case itself, it is worth noting, and important to practitioners to recognize, that the court was confronted by this issue in a case where the defendant was using indemnification as a counterclaim to ward off a breach of fiduciary duty claim against it by a trustee by trying to pass the liability back to the trustee; it may well be that the court would have reached a different conclusion if presented with a more traditional contribution/indemnification scenario, where the defendant fiduciary was not trying to use the doctrines offensively, but instead simply to spread the liability owed to the plaintiff as a result of fiduciary breaches among all fiduciaries who may have participated in the breach.

Finally, although it seems to be the court’s rejection of the contribution and indemnity doctrines as applicable under ERISA that has caught the attention of observers, of at least equal interest is the court’s further discussion of a particularly timely issue, which is the defendant’s status as a fiduciary and possible breach of fiduciary duty based on failure to disclose fees fully and on receiving “revenue sharing payments in the form of 12b-1 and sub-transfer agency fees from
the funds in which it invested on the Plan’s behalf.” The court provides a nice analysis of these issues, making the case a good starting point for analyzing them with regard to the ever growing number of such cases being filed.

The macro view of trends is often fun, but detailed analysis of what is really going on is often more fruitful. A long, long time ago – in blog years, anyway, which given the youth of legal blogging is akin to dog years – I wrote this post about how the rise of employment practices liability insurance would inevitably lead to a certain level of price pressures, standardization and commoditization with regard to employment law services. This excellent article here details the underlying developments that drive this type of commoditization of legal services.

Geez, I hate to do this, but sometimes you have to play connect the dots. Reading this story about amateur (some would call it democratically run – small d, local government style) municipal pension plans and their investment strategies that got them caught up in the current collateralized debt obligation/securitization mess, I kept thinking to myself, where is the responsible, professional, knowledgeable fiduciary (or fiduciary retained vendor) in the investment decisions being chronicled. I don’t see them anywhere in the story. I see what appear to be the fiduciaries in over their heads and taking advice from what, in essence, are sales people. So what happens now in those cases (I mean besides the pension plans taking big losses)? Well, either the fiduciaries are liable for the mistakes they made, or they need to find – and sue – someone who is, as suggested in this piece here.

Many commentators often have a problem with fiduciary obligations and how they are interpreted, but to me, they play an essential role, and reflect a perfect fit between aspirations and legal obligations. The fiduciary alone stands in a position to protect plan assets, while simultaneously bearing the initial exposure for failing to do so, and thus has both an obligation and a deep rooted need to actually manage a pension plan well. It is not a job for amateurs, and is not simply a role in which it is enough to just do your best. Plan participants deserve, and legal obligations require, a level of expertise far beyond what is reflected in these types of stories.

One continuing theme in the posts on this blog is the replacement by plaintiffs’ class action firms of securities actions with ERISA breach of fiduciary duty actions in stock drop and similar type cases; the large class actions are brought on behalf of plan participants who hold company stock, often in an ESOP, against the plan fiduciaries. Such claims, for all intents and purposes, serve as independent securities type lawsuits against the company involved, through the guise of a breach of fiduciary duty lawsuit against the company’s designated fiduciaries, without having to meet all the rigmarole of a traditional class action securities fraud suit. I have posted often about this developing trend pretty much since launching this blog, and it has become a commonplace among other commentators as well.

Well, Georgetown law student Clovis Trevino Bravo has taken this line of thinking one step farther, authoring a detailed look at the advantages of prosecuting these types of cases under ERISA instead of under the securities laws, with a particular focus on the procedural and discovery advantages that accrue to the litigator who files such cases under ERISA rather than under the securities laws. Beyond that, she does an admirable job of synthesizing the often conflicting case law as to the intersection of the two legal regimes, providing an understanding of an evolving consensus – which is still a bit of a moving target, though, as she notes – as to the obligations of an ERISA fiduciary trapped between two separate lines of legal duty, that provided by the law of ERISA and that provided under the securities acts.

You can read her article in full right here, and you should – it will be worth your while.

A little judicial activism anyone? I am not sure what else, when you look at the actual history of how ERISA preemption came into being, you can call the demands that come from many quarters for courts to reduce the scope of preemption in the ERISA context, or, for that matter, the Ninth Circuit’s decision upholding the San Francisco health insurance mandate. James Wooten, of the University at Buffalo Law School, documents the political history of the enactment of ERISA and its broad preemption provision in this article here, emphasizing that the history of federal regulation and statutory enaction in this field progressed from one – based in legislation from the 1950s – that ceded much authority to the states to one – encapsulated in ERISA – that removed the states entirely from the field. Professor Wooten explains that the eventual progression reached the point where: “Over the course of the Ninety-Third Congress, which passed ERISA, lawmakers further expanded the preemption language so that employee benefit plans became ‘an area of exclusive federal concern.’ ERISA § 514(a) preempts state regulation of benefit plans even with respect to matters federal law does not address.” It is simply hard to understand how decisions such as the Ninth Circuit ruling that – contrary to all other courts presented with the same issues – found that a local ordinance mandating a certain structure with regard to employee benefit plans is not preempted can square with the well-documented legislative history of a deliberate intent to preempt the states even, as the professor phrases it, “with respect to matters federal law does not [even] address.” Quite simply, rulings and arguments by commentators that ERISA preemption should be read more narrowly than has been the case, and concomitant decisions like the Ninth Circuit ruling on the San Francisco act, may be understandable as an argument for or exercise in some sort of normative cum Dworkian cum Judge Hercules decision making, where the courts are to bring an aging statute into compliance with current circumstances, but they certainly cannot be justified as an accurate interpretation of congressional intent itself.

Remember the grave concern in different quarters about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue would lead to a flood of litigation? Turns out it didn’t even do so in the LaRue case itself, which, now on remand at the trial court level, has been voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff to avoid the expense of litigating the case. There’s your real check on excessive litigation: the costs of pursuing them. While ERISA grants a prevailing party the right to recover attorney’s fees, it is not a given that they will be awarded, particularly in a case, such as LaRue, where – as the multiplicity of opinions at the Supreme Court make clear – the law governing the issues in dispute is unsettled. Moreover, they are only awarded if you win; litigating a questionable case at significant expense risks large attorney’s fees that may never be recouped.

Of course, I guess all of this is just a back door argument for the outcome suggested by the opinion in Bendaoud discussed here: that the LaRue type cases are better structured as class actions than individual actions, for a variety of reasons, apparently including that litigating one small case is just plain not cost effective.

I have written before about why insurance companies use experts on insurance coverage, and why policyholders need to use them too. Indeed, there is little doubt in my mind that lawyers who aren’t specialists in the field often put their clients at a disadvantage when they engage insurance companies in disputes over insurance policies without bringing in someone with years of experience interpreting and arguing over the language in policies. This case here out of the Massachusetts Appeals Court yesterday, involving a seemingly routine dispute over which of two insurers should foot the bill for an accident involving an automobile, illustrates the point beautifully. The court’s decision – which placed the risk on an auto insurer and liberated a general liability insurer – pivoted on one issue, consisting of what exactly is meant by the three mundane words “arising out of.” Plain English words, of course, ones that we have all used since we were children and which everyone knows the meaning of. But to understand and interpret an insurance policy, you need to understand the gloss on those words that generations of insurance coverage litigation have grafted onto them and, indeed, to apply the relevant policy terms you have to give a more precise definition to that term than most individuals would bother to give to it in daily speech. Here’s how Massachusetts law now defines those three little words:

Our cases indicate that the expression "arising out of," both in coverage and exclusionary clauses,

"must be read expansively, incorporating a greater range of causation than that encompassed by proximate cause under tort law. Indeed, cases interpreting the phrase … suggest a causation more analogous to ‘but for’ causation, in which the court examining the exclusion inquires whether there would have been personal injuries, and a basis for the plaintiff’s suit, in the absence of the objectionable underlying conduct."

Bagley v. Monticello Ins. Co., 430 Mass. 454, 457 (1999), and cases cited.

The statement in Ruggerio, supra at 797, that "the expression [‘arising out of’] does not refer to all circumstances in which the injury would not have occurred ‘but for’ the involvement of a motor vehicle," does not weaken the broad standard of Bagley, and that standard has been quoted by the Supreme Judicial Court with approval. See Fuller v. First Financial Ins. Co., 448 Mass. 1, 6-7 (2006). Put another way, what is required for injuries to "arise out of" the loading of a vehicle is a reasonably apparent causal connection between the loading of the vehicle and the injury. See Ruggerio, supra at 798; Metropolitan Property & Cas. Ins. Co. v. Santos, 55 Mass.App.Ct. at 795.

Plain as day, right?