26 Parker Hudson Attorneys Receive Honors From The Best Lawyers In America©
Aug 20, 2020
Overview
ERISA is complex, but we’re here to help. Our clients trust our employee benefits & ERISA attorneys for smart advice and a practical approach to even their most complicated benefits challenges.
ERISA creates a challenging and time-consuming landscape. We help business executives, fiduciaries, and HR leaders who need compliance guidance – devising long-term plans for avoiding legal problems.
Our deep-seated experience in employee benefits law is sufficient for any business or corporation, and we’re ready to work fluently with any officer or executive regardless of their level of ERISA comfort. We have the veteran knowledge and bench depth it takes to avoid mishaps in the precarious EB/ERISA minefield.
Our approach includes:
- Practical advice couched in your business objectives
- Benefit plan strategy and design from inception to de-risking, termination, and beyond
- Getting to know the ins and outs of your company (and industry) so that our judgment calls are always made shrewdly, and our advice is situated in context
- Ease of communication between our most experienced attorneys and your most senior business leaders, cutting through the legalese and getting to the heart of what’s required
- Strategizing proactively to head off litigation before it happens
- Flexibility and discretion in our pricing, offering the same experience you would find in larger law firms’ regulatory or transaction teams, but with fee arrangements that provide better value for the client
ERISA is only one part of the picture. Employee benefits and executive compensation issues are affected by a complex entanglement of laws: tax rules, corporate regulation, securities, labor law, and beyond. Our attorneys adopt a whole-picture approach.
Experience includes:
- ERISA counseling
- Preemption
- Compliance
- Reporting
- Disclosure
- Drafting and filing of required notices
- Fiduciary requirements
- Health plan requirements
- Benefit plan strategy and design
- Audit representation & advice (including IRS audits & corrections)
- Federal agency relations (DOL, IRS, etc.)
- Class action defense
- De-risking
- Requirements for pension funding / pension plans
- Plan governance
Experience
- Assist a private individual with executive severance package relating to retail public company.
- Assist multi-business line holding company in development of phantom equity plan.
- Assisted a multinational Fortune 500 company with 100+ mergers involving 401(k) plans and defined benefit / cash balance plans over a 15-year period, including counseling on due diligence, designing and drafting plan documents and participant communications, and managing governmental filings.
- Advised and assisted a large not-for-profit tax-exempt hospital system with a defined benefit plan spin-off and termination to reduce plan expenses.
- Assisted a public company to de-risk its defined benefit plans through a lump sum window offering, including drafting plan amendments and participant communications.
- Assisted a Fortune 500 start-up company in structuring its health and welfare programs, including self-insured and fully insured health plans, disability programs, wrap plans, retiree-only plans, account-based programs (FSAs, HRAs, and HSAs), Section 125 plan, and fringe benefit programs.
- Conducted a comprehensive health and welfare benefits compliance audit (tax, HIPAA, COBRA, ERISA, etc.) for an affiliate of a private equity firm.
- Counseled the fiduciary committee for an affiliate of a large privately-held engineering, construction, and project management company on fiduciary responsibility, oversight, delegation, and best practices for administering qualified employee benefit plans and welfare programs, including conducting fiduciary training, risk assessments, and internal audits.
- Advised the fiduciary committee of a government contractor on the fiduciary implications in the purchase of a pension annuity contract for discrete participant populations.
- Advised a large not-for-profit tax-exempt hospital system on worker classification issues and consequences for employee benefit plans.
- Represented a large medical practice in its DOL audit and advised on applicable corrections.
- Counseled a large financial institution on an EPCRS submission to the IRS to correct late required minimum distributions payable to participants in multiple legacy plan populations.
- Negotiated a 403(b) vendor conversion for a large not-for-profit tax-exempt hospital system, including service agreements, trust agreements, and plan conversion documents.
- Assisted bankruptcy trustee for large financial institution with a 401(k) plan liquidation involving proceeds from ERISA and securities class actions, a transfer of defined benefit plan assets to the PBGC as trustee, and top hat plans.
- Represented multiemployer plan trustees in the mergers between four multiemployer defined benefit plans.
- Represented a law firm in its IRS audit involving multiple 401(k) plans.
- Counseled a large medical practice on the strategic plan termination of its cash balance plan and the establishment of a new cash balance plan with a different design and a different interest crediting rate.
- Advised the US subsidiary with an international parent company on various benefit matters including a 401(k) plan spin-off termination involving Puerto Rican participants.