This month Penn joined a familiar list of peer universities — including Duke, Harvard and Yale — in a lawsuit over employee retirement plans. The class action lawsuit claims that University retirement plans have been charging fees that are too high for school employees. All of the schools involved are being accused on the grounds that they all use several providers, as opposed to one, to manage …
In March, six Volkswagen retailers came together with the mission of negotiating an out-of-court settlement with the factory to compensate their fellow dealers for losses from the diesel emissions scandal, and averting what they feared would be messy litigation against their business partner. But when such a deal finally came together last week, it was disclosed by someone else: Steve Berman, a …
Is 401(k) fee litigation over? Now that many of the cases contending that large 401(k) plans paid too high fees have been settled or decided, it would be tempting for plan sponsors that haven’t been sued to breathe a sigh of relief. They should not do so, because litigation continues unabated with new theories and targets.
Not surprisingly, in its most recent round of “excessive fee” lawsuits under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), the plaintiffs’ bar has begun targeting 403(b) plans sponsored by higher education institutions such as Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and Duke University. Cases like Tibble v. Edison …
With some of the universities named in the lawsuits holding more than 400 fund options managed by five or more record keepers, universities will have a difficult time wading through details of each fund to determine if and how they could have noticed trends of investment underperformance. But with higher education at large struggling to maintain endowment gains, and …
Asset managers that limit employee retirement plan investment choices to proprietary, in-house mutual funds are putting a legal target on their backs, attorneys said. In the context of a rash of lawsuits by employees against financial services companies alleging breach of fiduciary duty in managing 401(k) plans, asset management companies that populate their retirement plans solely with house …
Former members of First Baptist Church of Hammond argue in a federal lawsuit that the church is responsible for an investment fraud run by a deacon hired by the church to provide financial advice. The former parishioners – Joseph and Crystal Elwell, formerly of Schererville, and Deborah and Robert Baldwin, formerly of Crown Point – say in the lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court …
A settlement has been reached involving Eastman Kodak and some of its current and past employees over a class action lawsuit. The settlement totals $9.7 million dollars. It has to do with lawsuits following Kodak’s 2012 bankruptcy filing, involving participants in the company’s savings and investment plan for employees and the Kodak Employee Stock Ownership plan.