Nevin's Data "Points"

  I recently stumbled across a report that claimed a “Massive Gap Between Participant and Attorney Recoveries in ERISA Lawsuits.” That wasn’t exactly news to me, though it was a handy quantification [i]  of a subset of ERISA settlements to make the case that the per-participant recoveries in ERISA litigation pale in comparison to the 25%–33% “pay day” that the plaintiffs’ bar gets in cases where there is a settlement. The  report  — by Davis & Harman — focused on 27 settlements in 2025 involving (only) underperformance and excessive fee cases. In producing their conclusion, they employed some math that was arguably a bit “squishy” [ii]  — and the results are all over the board — but you didn’t need to rely on that to see — and appreciate — the huge gap between what wound up in the lawyers’ pockets versus participants. The rationale is, of course, that class action suits can be expensive to mount and pursue. The attorneys take on these cases, investing their ...

   I recently did a roundup of some of the most significant retirement-related events of 2025. Then Jack VanDerhei, PhD fed that column through ChatGPT applying the style that famed humorist Dave Barry takes with HIS annual Year-in-Review. The result follows... Enjoy! The Year in Retirement Plans: 2025 By someone who survived it and would like credit By almost any measure, 2025 was a remarkable year for retirement plans, largely because it managed to be historically consequential without passing a single massive, system-rewriting law. This is unusual in the same way it is unusual when your roof collapses even though no meteor hit it. There was no SECURE Act sequel. No Pension Protection Act reboot. Congress flirted with something called the One Big Beautiful Bill , then decided retirement plans should sit this one out, possibly because they were tired. Instead, 2025 delivered something far more subtle and far more exhausting: implementation problems, interpretive confu...

  By almost any measure, 2025 was a remarkable year for retirement plans — perhaps especially because it passed without any sweeping, system-altering legislation. Not that that is (necessarily) a bad thing. There was no SECURE Act moment, nor Pension Protection Act-scale reset. While retirement plans “ducked” the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, 2025 brought with it challenges of implementation, interpretation, and an extraordinary amount of litigation. Rules were finalized, challenged, and reconsidered; courts grappled with fundamental ERISA questions; a new Administration “recalibrated” long-held positions; and plan fiduciaries were reminded — again — that prudence is ultimately, if not immediately, judged by process, not outcomes. Taken individually, many of these developments might seem incremental. Taken together, they made 2025 one of the most consequential years for the retirement system in quite some time. Let’s take a look back at the year that was… January In the waning days ...