Employee Benefits

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Attracting and hiring the best people your company can afford, then motivating and retaining them—these are likely to be among your key business strategies. A well-designed benefits program can be an important tool to help your business achieve them.

The attorneys who make up Hodgson Russ’s Employee Benefits Practice Group solve challenging problems, help clients meet their objectives, and provide clients with a competitive edge. We follow developments with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor, allowing us to assess and react quickly to new developments and opportunities on behalf of our clients.

Hodgson Russ has been awarded prestigious Best Law Firms Metropolitan Tier 1 rankings by Best Lawyers/U.S. News & World Report in the Employee Benefits (ERISA) Law category and the Litigation—ERISA category.

The Hodgson Russ Employee Benefits Practice Group Actively Supports Clients Who Want to Attract, Hire, and Retain the Best Employees. Here’s How:

We help our clients establish, maintain, and operate tax-qualified retirement plans and trusts. The Employee Benefits Practice Group:

• Drafts and reviews plan and trust documents
• Provides sponsors with advice on keeping plans in compliance with relevant laws and regulations
• Assists clients in using IRS and DOL-sanctioned self-correction programs as needed
• Develops appropriate plan procedures, employee communications, and administrative forms

We also help our clients establish and maintain a wide variety of welfare and fringe benefit plans, including:

• Group health plans for active employees and retirees, including plan designs using high-deductible health plans, HSAs, self-insured arrangements, and other innovations
• Cafeteria or flexible benefits plans
• VEBA trusts and other post-retirement benefit funding mechanisms

We also provide comprehensive legal counsel to our clients covering medical plan documents, plan descriptions, and COBRA and HIPAA compliance.

We provide counsel about the following Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) topics and more:

• Fiduciary responsibility and liability
• Claims procedures
• Multiemployer plans and withdrawal liability
• Reporting and disclosure requirements
• Prohibited transactions and applications for exemptions

When qualified retirement plans are unable to generate desired benefit levels for highly compensated employees and senior executives, the Employee Benefits Practice Group assists clients in designing, drafting, and implementing supplemental retirement benefits and other nonqualified deferred compensation arrangements.

The Employee Benefits Practice Group designs and implements a variety of stock-based compensation programs for both publicly traded and privately held businesses, including the use of stock options, stock appreciation rights, and restricted stock.

Hodgson Russ attorneys develop other specialized compensation programs for executives and senior staff. In addition to deferred and stock-based compensation programs, our attorneys are experienced with the tax and other legal issues involved in employment and change-in-control agreements (such as 409A and 280G golden parachute taxation), performance-based or incentive compensation arrangements, and compliance with 162(m) deduction limitations.

The employee benefits team is knowledgeable about the special parameters applicable to tax-exempt employers when it comes to qualified retirement plan rules and deferred compensation arrangements, such as 403(b) tax shelter annuity plans and Code section 457 deferred compensation plans.

Some People Say We “Wrote the Book” on Taxation of Distributions From Qualified Plans—And We Did.

Taxation of Distributions From Qualified Plans, written by members of the Hodgson Russ Employee Benefits Practice Group, is a 700-page publication and the seminal work in its field. It’s available for purchase online at www.riahome.com/estore.

Put Our Experience to Work

Hodgson Russ is a full-service law firm, offering clients seamless access to knowledgeable and experienced attorneys who practice in virtually every area of U.S. business law. Here are a few that our employee benefits clients find particularly valuable:

Our benefits litigation team handles benefits claims and claims for breach of fiduciary duty and provides litigation exposure and avoidance counsel to plan sponsors. Although our employee benefits attorneys’ attention to plan operations renders litigious situations less frequent, clients have the security of having our respected team of litigators on hand if an unfortunate situation arises.

The Labor & Employment Practice Group attorneys at Hodgson Russ generally counsel management only, serving public and private, unionized and non-union clients in matters involving a wide range of labor and employment laws and guidelines. We focus on preventive steps, believing that avoidance of litigation and human resources problems is the most effective method of minimizing costly employment disputes.