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One of the more notable fiduciary liability trends in recent years has been the wave of employer-sponsored retirement account excess fee litigation. In the following guest post, Neil R. Morrison, Lars Golumbic, and Kara Petteway Wheatley take a look at a possible new fiduciary liability trend – health plan fee litigation. Neil is an Associate Vice President and Claims Counsel at Sompo, North America in Morristown, N.J., and Lars Golumbic and Kara Petteway Wheatley are Principals at Groom Law Group, Chartered in Washington, D.C. This article was originally published by Mealey’s Litigation Report: ERISA.  I would like to thank the authors for allowing me to publish their article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is the authors’ article.Continue Reading Guest Post: Health Plan Fee Litigation: The Next Wave of ERISA Litigation?

The current disruption to normal business operations across the country means that many businesses will soon be under significant financial pressure, if they are not there already. As their companies edge toward insolvency, directors are going to have to make significant decisions about the companies and their operations. Boards may be concerned, as they make critical and difficult decisions, that creditors or others may later attempt to claim that they violated their legal duties.  This concern in turn leads to the question about exactly what duties directors face as their companies approach insolvency.
Continue Reading Cash-Crunched Companies Face Insolvency; Will Directors Face Claims?

sup ct 5ERISA plan fiduciaries have a continuing duty to monitor selected plan investments and to remove imprudent investment selections, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous May 18, 2015 opinion in Tibble v. Edison International. Although the Court affirmed the fiduciary duty to monitor, it otherwise left the development of the duty’s contours to be delineated…

dolAccording to a June 23, 2014 Wall Street Journal article entitled “U.S. Increases Scrutiny of Employee-Stock Ownership Plans” (here), the federal government is “stepping up scrutiny of how U.S. companies are valued for employee-stock ownership plans.” This increased scrutiny includes increased litigation activity, often alleging that ESOP share valuations are flawed. The targets …

On July 24, 2013, in a case the court said was one of “first impression,” the First Circuit held that, due to the nature of its involvement in the management of its portfolio company’s operations, a private equity firm was potentially liable for the portfolio company’s pension obligations. The decision has significant implications for the…

As D&O maven Dan Bailey noted in a recent memo (here), ERISA class action litigation represents a significant and growing liability exposure for benefit plan fiduciaries. With the recent addition of the $70.5 million settlement in the Tyco ERISA class action lawsuit (about which refer here) and the $55 million settlement in…

In a noteworthy subprime-related litigation development, on August 5, 2009, the parties to the Countrywide ERISA action filed a stipulation of settlement (here), together with a request for preliminary court approval. Under the stipulation, the case is to be settled by a payment of $55 million, to be funded entirely by Countrywide’s fiduciary…

A frequent securities class action lawsuit accompaniment is a companion ERISA stock drop lawsuit brought on behalf of employee participants in the defendant company’s benefit plan. These ERISA lawsuits have in recent years resulted in a string of impressive settlements, although the plaintiffs have not fared as well in the few cases that have actually…