Benefits & ERISA Law

TARP and ERISA Litigation

Here’s an interesting looking and timely webinar from West next week on the stock market meltdown, the bank bailout, and their effect on ERISA governed plans. The short version of their pitch for the webinar, which ought to be in 20 point type spread across a banner headline, is “here come the breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits.” Overhyped? I doubt it. If the markets are down 40%, so are gazillions of dollars in 401(k) assets. If an individual financial company’s stocks are being battered, then so to are megamillions of dollars in that company’s stock likely held by its own employees in esops and other vehicles. Who are all of these plan participants going to be looking at? Who can they actually make out a claim against, and have standing to sue? To ask these questions is to answer them: the applicable plan’s fiduciaries.

Now the interesting question, more so than whether such lawsuits are coming (the answer to that question falls in the dog bites man category) is the structure of the defenses that will be raised by the fiduciaries. You can expect some consistencies across the positions raised by the defendants, not the least of which - and the best of which may well be - that prudent investment processes were followed, so no breach occurred, and proper levels of disclosure to the plan participants were maintained, so again no breach occurred, but the fiduciaries got blindsided, with the underlying theme of, one, so did everybody else (supposedly, anyway) and, two, no one could have anticipated and avoided these losses. What do I think of these likely defenses? Well, it would take a book length piece to address the ins and outs of these defenses, their holes, their strengths, and their weaknesses. But I do know this - any fiduciary relying on such defenses better have a squeaky clean documented trail of disclosures to participants, investigation into investment options and vendors, and informed decision making to back it up, or they are going to be writing very big checks when all is said and done.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on October 16, 2008 (boomark / email).