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Defensive Plan Building, Otherwise Known as “Minimizing Legal Risks in the Design, Implementation and Administration of Employee Benefit Plans”

On Behalf of | Sep 15, 2015 |

I can’t even recall how many times I have written – on this blog and elsewhere – on what I call “defensive plan building,” which is the idea that plans should be designed, built out and operated with the risk of litigation and liability exposure carefully considered and planned for, with the goal of eliminating as many risks as possible. The idea is to think – not after being sued but when a plan is written, a vendor selected, funds chosen, an investment committee put together, and the like – how best to limit the liability risks of the plan sponsor and the plan’s fiduciaries.

Here’s an easy example. A couple of weeks ago I spoke on a Strafford webinar on the duty to monitor plan investments after the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit’s rulings in Tibble. One of my slides concerned a favorite topic of mine, which is the risk of corporate officers who are not directly involved in a plan’s operations being dragged into a dispute over the plan on the ground that they are functional fiduciaries of the plan (how this can happen, how it can be avoided, the status of the law on this issue under a wide variety of fact patterns, and the creativity of plaintiffs’ lawyers with regard to this issue are a subject for another day, one that perhaps warrants an entire article). Often, such officers and executives were not directly involved with the plan and, moreover, did not understand themselves to be occupying a role that could expose them to liability for the plan’s operations based on a claim that they were functional fiduciaries. As I explained in my presentation, getting dragged in this tangential way into class actions brought against a plan is not a good use of a senior executive’s time and focus, and likely not good for the longevity of the lawyer who designed the plan in a way that left a senior officer at risk of being named a defendant in such a claim. The point of “defensive plan building” is to look ahead at risks like this and design the plan in such a way that this doesn’t occur by accident, by insulating such senior officers from involvement that could drag them in as defendants. Multiply this by a thousand fold, concerning all of the other exposures that a plan can bring, and you have the idea of “defensive plan building:” look ahead when building and operating a plan at your potential exposures, and avoid the ones you want to avoid.

Now this is all nice as a theory, but there is no doubt it is hard to pull off. Plans are amazingly complicated machines, with a thousand moving parts. Worse yet, new theories of liability arise all the time, and one cannot predict whether certain actions taken today will run afoul of theories of liability crafted in the future. Just look, for instance, at excessive fee cases: the cost of funds certainly wasn’t on the radar screens of most plan sponsors and their lawyers several years ago, but it would be negligent of them to ignore those costs in designing a plan today.

I will have more of an opportunity to expand on this idea in November, when I will be speaking at the American Conference Institute’s conference on plan compliance issues in New York. The actual title of the conference is “Minimizing Legal Risks in the Design, Implementation and Administration of Employee Benefit Plans,” which could almost serve as a definition for the term “defensive plan building.” Peter Kelly, who is the Deputy General Counsel of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Ed Berrios of Chubb and I will be speaking as a panel on fiduciary liability and employee benefit risks, and dozens of others will be speaking on a range of other issues central to operating a well-run plan. Please click here for information and to register for this event.

To view Steve Rosenberg’s blog, click here.