Thought I would pass this along right now, while the article is still available to non-subscribers – I suspect if you read this post tomorrow, you will have to subscribe to get access to the article by then. Either way, here’s an interesting article available on Lawyers USA today on the LaRue decision, and on the broader topic of what impact it will have. I am quoted in it on the issue of whether it will spawn more litigation; to quote the article:

Some see the ruling as spawning multiple lawsuits by individual 401(k) account holders.

"It will open the door to a lot more litigation. I don’t think it will be an avalanche, but plan sponsors are definitely looking at death by a thousand cuts," said Stephen Rosenberg, an attorney with The McCormack Firm in Boston, who blogs on ERISA issues.

This is pretty consistent with what I said in my post last Friday, in which I discussed my views about how much litigation will result from this case. It is hard, as I said then, to quantify, but it is clear that the case paves the way for sponsors to face a steady stream of smaller cases, whereas in the past they really – or at least predominately – only had to worry about whether they were in a position to be targeted for a large dollar value, class wide type suit.

The topic of this article from yesterday’s Boston Globe, concerning behavioral economics and the idea that most people simply get it wrong when making investment choices with regard to retirement if they are left to their own devices, will be familiar to any long time reader of this blog, but it did catch my eye because its suggestion that employees need to be guided towards the right retirement choices echoes George Chimento’s point, which I discussed the other day, that perhaps 401(k) plans should actually be set up to take those choices away from employees and place them in the hands of someone with more knowledge about the subject. It’s a provocative idea, one that runs counter to the general Zeitgeist that we are all now responsible for funding our own retirements rather than passively relying on our employers to provide that as well, but the question of how best to generate appropriate returns for employees invested in such plans is, and should be, more widely discussed, including with regard to how much say individual employees should have in the matter. The Globe article is a nice survey of the theory behind the idea of just how much choice should be granted to employees in that context, and how structuring the choices available to them may affect the outcome for their retirements.

Fair warning, though: you may have to register (its free, but still annoying) to access the Globe article.

I thought I would pass along today this article from Business Insurance in which I am interviewed about LaRue, and its impact on plan sponsors. The point of the article is that the decision opens them up to more potential liability, and they need to be aware of that. I am actually a little bit agnostic as to how much this ruling will increase litigation over these types of cases, given the expense and difficulty of litigating these types of cases if you are a participant. Probably for practical reasons – because I could, and probably did in the interview, go on at length about this topic – the article doesn’t contain all of my comments on this point. The gist of my thoughts on the issue, however, is that, as a practical matter, LaRue lowers the financial bar for suits over problems in 401(k) plans and makes it more likely that smaller company plans may be sued for the types of errors – such as excessive fees, company stock, and the like – that big plans get sued over. This is because these types of claims have predominately been brought so far on a class wide basis by class action plaintiff firms. As a result, only larger sponsors with large possible exposures were really in the cross hairs for these types of defects in 401(k) plans, because that is who the class action bar targets; LaRue, by at least establishing the right of participants to bring suits over these same issues only on their own behalf lowers the bar and provides an avenue for much smaller suits over these types of issues. This puts smaller company plans in the line of fire for suits over these issues, because while they may not have sufficient assets to attract the interest of the class action bar, they still have enough assets to attract lawsuits from their own participants.

One of the common themes of many of my posts, as well as of many of the judicial opinions, concerning fiduciary obligations of companies sponsoring 401(k) plans is the need to bring in outside expertise to manage the plans, particularly for the purpose of insuring that investment selections are appropriate and priced right. As I have discussed both in numerous posts and in a range of articles in which I have been quoted, smaller and mid-sized companies generally lack the expertise to properly handle all of the aspects of 401(k) plans and can best discharge their fiduciary duties – and best protect themselves against litigation – by retaining outside experts to manage a plan. There is an entire industry that exists to service such companies and their plans. Here is a story out of New Hampshire that illustrates this point brilliantly; it concerns a small company that believed it could operate its own 401(k) plan without an outside vendor, and ended up, without any intention to defraud, being pursued by the Department of Labor for $33,000 in employee contributions that were never paid into the plan. By all accounts, the company was not engaged in anything underhanded; it just was wrong in thinking it could handle the logistics itself.

And not to beat the LaRue drum too much, but obviously the establishment in that case of the right of plan participants to sue fiduciaries for mistakes affecting their 401(k) accounts (whatever may be the exact parameters of that right, an issue up for some debate in light of some of the vagaries of the three opinions from the Supreme Court), just drives home the importance of making sure that a 401(k) plan is run absolutely as well as possible.

Can’t do LaRue all the time, every post, although, frankly, the more one thinks about the Supreme Court’s three opinions, the more one can come up with to talk about. I will return to various issues raised by the opinion here and there, as time and interest allows. For now, though, I think I owe some posts that can be attributed to the insurance litigation side of this blog’s title to readers who are interested in that topic, and I have been thinking – when not obsessing over whether individuals can sue for mistakes in their 401(k) plans, that is – about all the legal seminars and publications that have been showing up in my in-box lately anticipating insurance coverage litigation over climate change issues. One of the interesting things about these is that they are showing up in droves now, long before suits seeking to recover for climate change losses have even been pursued. As I have said before on these electronic pages, insurance is the real leading edge indicator for a lot of issues, and one of them is climate change; the insurance industry will be one of the first to be heavily impacted by increased climate related losses, through its coverage of property and liability risks, and will, concomitantly, be one of the first to take concrete business steps in response to global warming. This early media drumbeat over insurance coverage issues related to climate change litigation reflects an eternal truth: that any possible new area of business liability, such as over climate change, will simultaneously spawn a cottage industry in representing businesses against insurers over those new liabilities. On a more substantive note, the particularly interesting thing to me about the seminars I am seeing is that these educational materials present the issue as essentially an extension into the climate change area of the legal developments generated during the last broadly contested, high stakes area of coverage disputes, namely environmental losses related to Superfund and other environmental liabilities. It’s a logical step, if one thinks about it: the environmental coverage disputes revolved primarily around the environmental impacts of the dumping of pollutants, and the new climate change issues will also concern environmental impacts, only in this instance ones that stem from the global warming impacts of certain business practices. The earlier environmental coverage rulings issued primarily in the late eighties and early nineties are thus a natural base on which to analyze the insurance coverage issues raised by climate change liabilities. In a way, it even fits the historical development of insurance coverage law. The environmental coverage litigation really expanded from, and built upon, the mass tort coverage disputes of asbestos, most concretely in the extension of trigger of coverage issues decided in that earlier context into the environmental pollution context; it only makes sense that the same historical evolution would continue into the next “hot” (pun intended) realm of insurance coverage litigation, in this instance by taking coverage decisions related to environmental polluting and rejiggering them to apply to climate change exposures.

There’s a lot out there on the Supreme Court’s ruling in LaRue, and I thought I would pass along today a couple of articles and blog posts that approach the issues raised by the case from a slightly different perspective than simply the technical legal issues raised by the case. Employee benefits lawyer George Chimento discusses the LaRue decision in this client advisory here, with a focus on a particular question, namely, whether in light of the problems posed by LaRue type cases, it makes any sense to sponsor a 401(K) plan that allows participants to pick and choose among investments. He makes a compelling argument that it just may not make any sense to do this, given the liability risks, amply illustrated by the LaRue case, and the investment skills of the average participant. He sums that issue up in this paragraph from his article:

With all this additional liability, is it wise to sponsor self-directed plans, with the extra expenses associated with open-end mutual funds and daily investment switching? Are participants really better off self-managing their retirement assets, doing something they were not educated to do? Perhaps it’s safer, and better for all parties, just to have an "old fashioned" managed fund, without participant direction, and to employ properly certified investment managers who can be delegated fiduciary liability under ERISA. A dividend of LaRue is that it may cause employers to step back and reconsider the current, expensive, and dangerous fad of self-direction.

And Kevin LaCroix, a lawyer/expert insurance intermediary, tackles LaRue in this interesting blog post on his well-regarded D&O Diary blog, in which he focuses on the issues for fiduciary liability insurance raised by the case. One interesting point he makes is that the availability of coverage may be affected by exactly that split between the Justice Roberts’ concurrence and the other two opinions, related to whether or not claims of this nature should actually be prosecuted only as denial of benefits claims, or instead as breach of fiduciary duty claims. Anyone interested in the insurance implications of LaRue should find it a useful and informative post.

Some follow up thoughts on the Supreme Court’s opinion in LaRue, after having some time to digest it. First, the court’s three opinions make for an interesting assortment of analyses of the issue, but what is most important on the front lines, down at the trial level where these issues play out in court, is the unanimous agreement that an individual 401(k) participant can sue for losses to just his or her account. This resolves a key dispute that, I know from my own practice, has become a key issue in the question of when and how participants can seek legal redress with regard to their 401(k) accounts.

Second, the three opinions set forth almost radically different answers to the question of how and why such an individual participant can sue for losses just to his or her account in a 401(k) plan. The majority opinion posits that this is the appropriate reading of ERISA in the context of defined contribution plans, which may be different from what the rule should be with regard to defined benefit plans. The second opinion, by Justice Roberts, poses the extremely thorny argument that, while a plan participant can sue for such losses, he or she should do so under the denial of benefits portion of ERISA, rather than under the breach of fiduciary duty portion of ERISA. The third opinion, by Justice Thomas, finds that the plain language of the statute warrants individual participants being allowed to bring such claims, and holds no truck with the idea, relied on by the majority, that there is some underlying principle distinct to defined contribution plans that either justifies – or is necessary to justify – this conclusion.

The competing opinions present some interesting issues. First off, Justice Roberts’ suggestion that the law governing denied benefits, rather than the law of breach of fiduciary duty, should apply to the circumstances of the LaRue case appears unworkable in the context of that particular type of claim, for a variety of practical and legal reasons; there is a certain extent to which it seems to me that even suggesting that is to work mischief, particularly for the judges and litigants who, going forward, are going to have to work out the myriad issues that claims like that brought by the participant in LaRue raise, none of which were preemptively resolved by the Supreme Court. Second, there is something telling in the contrast between Justice Thomas’ approach and that of the majority, something that may well be a clash of philosophy, not just with regard to statutory construction for purposes of the instant case, but also perhaps as well with regard to the road that lays ahead for the law of ERISA. Justice Thomas is correct in his opinion that the issue can be resolved, in the participant’s favor, simply off of the plain language of the statute, without relying on any special considerations raised by the fact that the case involves a defined contribution account rather than a defined benefit plan, which is the issue animating the majority’s opinion. Does the majority’s heavy emphasis on the fact that LaRue concerned a defined contribution plan hint at a belief among the majority that, in fact, ERISA needs to be treated as an organic, evolving body of law that needs to shift from its past precedents to account for the rise of defined contribution plans? And if so, is the emphasis on this point in the majority’s opinion a subtle suggestion to lower courts to approach new issues brought before them concerning defined contribution plans – or even old issues never before resolved under defined contribution plans – with an eye to how ERISA should develop to fit those types of plans? At a minimum, it is hard not to see lawyers for participants arguing exactly that to district courts and circuit courts of appeal in the aftermath of the ruling in LaRue.

As a practicing litigator, I often can’t delve too deeply into a particular issue right when it arises, and instead have to return to it that night to analyze it for further discussion the next day. With a trial set to start in one of my cases and a court appearance this afternoon, this is one of those instances, but I did want to pass along the Supreme Court’s opinion in LaRue, just issued today. I will give it a more in-depth read tonight and may post more on it tomorrow, but in the interim, here is the opinion itself, along with two initial, superficial thoughts. First, as I – and others – expected, the opinion goes in favor of the plan participant, and expands the right of individual plan participants to sue for breach of fiduciary duties. Second, on first glance, the opinion seems animated by the need to account for the particular risks of defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s, and to recognize the need for the law of ERISA to develop in a manner that accounts for the transition to those types of benefit plans. In a weird bit of precognition, that’s something I just talked about in my post earlier this morning, on the Supreme Court accepting cert on still another ERISA case.

Interestingly, right after I posted about Albert Feuer’s detailed analysis of the proper role of Qualified Domestic Relations Orders (“QDRO”) in the ERISA scheme, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case on that exact issue (although I don’t intend to imply a causal relationship between the two events). The Court granted cert yesterday in the case of Kennedy v. DuPont Plan Administrator, but only on Question number 3 raised in the petition, which was whether ERISA’s QDRO provisions are the only manner in which an ex-spouse can waive rights to a former spouse’s pension benefits. SCOTUS blog has the story here, and the petition (as well as the opposition) here.

This order continues a trend I suggested we would see, namely the Supreme Court, having concluded its efforts to redirect the path of patent law after substantial criticism in the business, legal and academic communities that the governing body of law in that area was veering wildly off course, turning to another statutory body of law, ERISA, that has likewise come under significant criticism, in this instance because of the stress points that have erupted as the law of ERISA has attempted to cope with the transition from a defined benefits world of pensions – where employees bore little risk – to a defined contribution world, in which employees bear most of the risk and thus place more demands on ERISA and the case law interpreting it. Still, even under those circumstances, the focus on QDROs seems a slightly unusual point of emphasis for the Court, given the range of ERISA related issues that the Court could select from. The case and the issue presented do, however, concern pension benefits and the impact of ERISA on employee’s rights under them, fitting with the theme I identified above, plus QDROs themselves are being interpreted in some interesting ways at the district court level, as I suggested in this post, ways that may not be an exact fit with the statutory requirements.

One of the widest read and linked to posts I have written recently was this one here providing the law of the so-called tripartite relationship in thumb nail fashion. Interest in this topic surprises me to a certain extent, because very much the point of the post was that, despite all the seminars and publications addressing the topic, I really think the rules governing the relationship among insureds, insurers and insurer appointed defense counsel boil down to a pretty simple set of working principles, which I discussed in that blog post.

However, it is clear that many people have a great deal of questions about the topic and want more education on the subject, and I can think of no better sources to answer such questions and provide education on it than the panelists on this upcoming seminar on the topic; among the panelists is Marc Mayerson, who writes the Insurance Scrawl blog on insurance coverage topics.