For this week’s Five Favorites for Friday, I have a full stocking of gifts (too early for Xmas allusions? Maybe, but I was in New York for work and saw the Rockefeller Center Tree, which inspired that lede). Let’s get right into opening them up (and yes, I will probably beat that gag to death

ERISA litigation goes through phases and waves. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed I was constantly litigating, in multiple cases, the distinction between so-called ministerial functions – which cannot support fiduciary liability – and fiduciary conduct. Here’s one example. Over time and a number of judicial decisions, an interpretative bulletin issued by

This week, I cheated. I have known since Tuesday that I wasn’t going to have time to either blog or post on LinkedIn this week on even a small portion of the articles, ideas, podcasts and presentations that were crossing my desk and catching my eye. So I started writing this week’s Five Favorites for

I talked briefly about withdrawal liability in my very first “Five Favorites for Friday” post, which you can find here. Because there is often so much money at stake, and because unions are aggressive in pursuing and claiming withdrawal liability payouts from departing employers, and because departing employers so want to not pay withdrawal

Fred Reish has an excellent article out on the technical and substantive aspects of the executive – and soon to be regulatory – efforts to open 401(k) plans to alternative investments, with a particular focus on the targeting (pun intended) of target date funds as the channel for bringing them into the investment holdings of

In earlier posts in my Plan Sponsor and Fiduciary 2.0 series I promised to provide a cheat sheet for fiduciaries confronting the push to add private equity and other alternative assets to 401(k) plans.  Here it is, with a focus on private equity assets, because that is where most of the initial action currently is