With all due apologies to longtime Globe sports columnist Dan Shaugnessy, who would periodically “clean out his desk” by running a column of short bits he had collected, here’s a list, in no particular order, of interesting (to me, anyway) items I took away from ACI’s excellent 8th National Forum on ERISA Litigation in New York City this week, where I spoke on ethical issues in ERISA litigation:
●What a great group of panelists, and thoughtful, educated audience. They reaffirmed my (somewhat narcissistic and self serving) belief that ERISA litigation attracts and holds onto the sharper tools in the bar.
●Day 2 of the conference had an excellent panel on ESOPs, with at least one panelist noting the pervasive problem of conflicted fiduciaries in this area, who may have interests in the outcome of a transaction that are not the same as those of the employee participants in the ESOP. During the course of the day, whether at lunch or by the coffee table outside the meeting room, everyone I spoke to had a horror story about a conflicted ESOP trustee and an ESOP transaction that disserved employees as a result. Isn’t it past time to effectively require the appointment of independent fiduciaries, from outside of the employee owned or soon to be employee owned company, to pass on transactions on behalf of the employee owners?
●I’ve been hearing for years that Broadway is either dead or dying, but you couldn’t tell that from the outdoor advertising at all of the theaters surrounding the conference site. Either all the shows out there right now are the best there’s ever been, or it is truth in advertising, rather than Broadway, that is dead.
●Incidentally, every time I left my hotel I saw a big promo for Bradley Cooper in a new version of Elephant Man on stage. I know everyone’s a critic, but Cooper was the weak link in theAmerican Hustle cast, so I can’t say the promo had me reaching for my wallet.
●Nobody knows nothing, at this point, about what impact Dudenhoeffer will have (I exaggerate slightly, as many panelists and audience members had calculated and well-educated guesses as to the future of stock drop litigation). As I discussed with some members of the audience, one wonders whether the class action bar will go forum shopping with regard to the next round of decision making in this area, looking for the most favorable possible venues for the first of the next round of decisions in this area.
●Speaking of the class action bar, those of its members who were in the audience looked amused when a panelist referenced the class action bar as “sharks.”
●There was an excellent panel on the public pension crisis. It looks to me like the problem will inevitably be left to bankruptcy courts and litigators to sort out, which drives home the extent to which the political will and leadership needed to address the problem is absent.
●One of the most interesting panels to me every year is the insurance industry panel discussing fiduciary liability and other insurance matters related to insuring risks and exposures in the benefit plan industry. It lays the complexity of insurance coverage law (which many lawyers find a very complex area) on top of one of the few areas of the law that exceeds it in complexity, ERISA.
●In the time between the insurance panel’s presentation and getting back to my office, what showed up on my desk but a complicated problem concerning the extent of insurance coverage for an ERISA exposure.
●In the time between my own presentation on ethical issues in litigating ERISA cases and getting back to my office, what showed up on my desk but an ethical conundrum I had never seen nor even thought of before. Grist for the next time I give a presentation on that issue, I suppose.
●The judicial panels on the morning of the second day of the conference are always interesting, and it always catches my attention how many times, and in how many different ways, the judges reference their desire to have the lawyers before them simply act courteously and respectfully to each other in the cases pending before them. One judge commented that, from his seat on the bench, it looks to him that “civil lawyers act criminally to each other and criminal lawyers act civilly to each other.”
●In the time between that judicial panel and my own presentation several hours later, I received at least two emails that documented the judges’ concerns in this regard.
●And I bet so did every other lawyer sitting in the audience.
●There are worse places in the world to watch a World Series game than the West Side Palm in NY.
●I really enjoyed the top hat plan litigation presentation, but that may just be me. There is something I have always found fun about litigating top hat and other executive compensation disputes. Maybe it’s the structure of top hat plan cases, which have a very logical order and composition of issues that can be exploited by a litigator. The presentation matched this, with a focus on the step by step elements of creating top hat status and defending against challenges to it.
●And finally, the panelist who discussed standards of review in ERISA litigation and noted that he may be the only person in the room old enough to remember litigating before Firestone was a treat. Firestone was decided in1989, and, despite nearly 25 years of experience, I never litigated benefit disputes in a pre-Firestone environment, so it was fun to hear, even briefly, how the litigants and the courts addressed the standard of review in the days before Firestone(hint: they typically didn’t).