Employee Benefit Funds

SRK provides advice and litigation services for labor unions and employee benefit plans. Class action litigation can be an important tool in protecting the funds used to provide benefits to working families. The Firm is in the forefront of representing employee benefit funds in class actions designed to attack fraud, waste, exorbitant prices, and other illegal conduct which drives up the cost of the benefits provided, or which decreases the value of the fund’s investments. We are special counsel to a number of employee benefit funds and provide them advice as well as litigation services.

Employee benefit funds derive several advantages by bringing carefully chosen class action suits:

• class actions offer a more potent attack on lawbreakers than individual cases;

• they are an important way in which trustees can fulfill their fiduciary duties;

• bringing such cases shows participants and beneficiaries that the trustees are vigorously protecting the assets of the fund;

• such cases demonstrate to fund vendors that the trustees will not accept overcharges or unconscionable conduct with respect to goods and services purchased by the fund;

• they do not require any expenditure of fund monies, since the work is performed on a contingent fee basis, with all fees and costs paid out of any recovery;

• they give the trustees greater control over litigation affecting its participants and beneficiaries.

Employee benefit funds are particularly well-suited to bring class actions for securities fraud. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (“PSLRA”) was designed to allow large institutional investors to control such cases, in order to insure that the interests of the investors - not the lawyers - would control decision-making about the case. Many pension funds have taken advantage of the PSLRA to bring claims on behalf of themselves and other defrauded shareholders.