Category: Employment & Benefits, Legal Conferences, Litigation
Why Amara's Expansion of Remedies Matters Now, But Not So Much in the Long Term
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Expert Guest Entry by Stephen D. Rosenberg ,Originally Posted on bostonerisalaw.com
My small group of dedicated twitter followers know I was live tweeting last week from ACI’s ERISA Litigation conference in New York, at least for the first day of the conference. Tweeting allowed me to pass along ideas from the speakers and my own thoughts on their points in real time, which was, frankly, a lot of fun for me (if you haven’t tried live tweeting from an event, you should; it turns being an attendee watching others speak on a topic into a much more interactive and engaged experience). At the same time, though, its fair to say that many of the topics discussed by the panelists, and many of my own thoughts on those topics, don’t neatly fit within 140 characters, so I thought I would post some more detailed take aways from the conference, starting today.
One of the things that jumped out at me at the conference was the fact that the ERISA defense bar has clearly coalesced around the idea that Amara is a bad thing and that the expansion of equitable remedies set into motion by that opinion is objectionable. Even though I am, at least 80% of the time, a member of that defense bar, I think that’s a bit harsh and an overreaction. It does not strike me that the consensus defense bar view articulates a particularly substantial argument for why the Court was wrong to expand that remedy. At the end of the day, most of that remedial expansion – in the forms of reformation, estoppel and surcharge – is directed at only one phenomenon, which is the circumstance in which there is a disjunct between what a plan actually says and what is communicated to plan participants through summary plan descriptions, human resources employees, or other sources (though I have no illusions that participants and their lawyers won’t find ways to try to extend those remedies to other types of circumstances as well). To the extent that employees can show actual harm to them from that error (and by this I do not mean just being deprived of some legal right under ERISA or some hypothetical opportunity to act in response to learning the correct information, but rather some showing of actual concrete out of pocket loss to them), there is no reason they should be without a remedy, and the expansion of remedies in Amara prevents that otherwise all too common outcome.
As one of the prominent in-house attorneys speaking at the conference noted, the nature of ERISA is that the bar for proper performance by plan sponsors and administrators keeps rising, and that is as it should be: one panelist made the point that what is a best practice today in running a plan, will simply be the standard practice that must be lived up to tomorrow. This is all that Amara’s targeting of communication errors by imposing equitable remedies for them will really do in the end: make accurate participant communications a crucially important part of running a plan. As plan administrators raise their game in this regard (making what is today a best practice the standard in this regard in the future), these remedies and the Amara decision itself will become relatively unimportant, and people will come to wonder why there was so much defense bar hue and cry over Amara in the first place.