Benefits & ERISA Law

Pay Now and Later: High Plan Fees Pose an Increasing Risk of Fiduciary Exposure

Chip, chip, chip. No, that's not the sound of the polar ice caps shedding ice, although I suppose it could well be. It's the sound of the Fortress Europa that some of the more optimistic lawyers for 401(k) plans thought was being enacted against excessive fee claims - in the wake of cases such as Hecker - slowly being whittled away. Cases such as this, in which the fiduciaries were found to have fallen down on the job by accepting retail class fees, are going to open the door to more of these cases, and to more settlements to resolve them, than seemed possible when the first wave of excessive fee type cases were being ruled on; indeed, as this client advisory points out, it is no longer possible for plan fiduciaries to simply ignore the question of the propriety of retail fees in their plans. I have long believed that it will take only a couple of district courts who are willing to allow excessive fee cases to proceed into discovery and to adjudication on their merits to turn excessive fee cases into a potentially significant risk for fiduciaries, and I feel comfortable predicting that this is the start of that trend. To add a Civil War metaphor to my earlier climate change and World War II metaphors, these types of cases are going to bear out my prior prediction that Hecker was likely to be the high water mark in the defense of excessive fee cases.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on July 26, 2010 (boomark / email).