How a seemingly unexciting case on retirement plans could have massive consequences
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A case like Anderson v. Intel Corporation Investment Policy Committee will never lead the evening news. There is no constitutional clash, no culture-war flashpoint – just a question about what a lawsuit must allege to survive its first test in court. But the stakes could hardly be more far-reaching. More than 100 million Americans save for retirement through employer-sponsored plans – 401(k)s and their kin – governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. That law does not command employers to offer plans; it cajoles them into doing so. And Congress built the statute so that the burdens of employer sponsorship – litigation expenses above all – would not “unduly discourage employers from offering” ERISA plans in the first place.
Whether that design endures is what the justices will decide next term.
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In Anderson, the question presented sounds technical: when a plaintiff claims that fiduciaries imprudently selected an underperforming investment, must the complaint identify a “meaningful benchmark” – a genuinely comparable fund against which the challenged one can be measured?
The facts show why the benchmark is decisive. After the 2008 crash erased over half the value of some stock-heavy retirement funds, Intel’s retirement-plan fiduciaries rebuilt key funds in its plans around a different goal: limiting losses rather than maximizing returns. They added substantial holdings in hedge funds, commodities, and private equity – assets that tend not to rise and fall with the stock market. Participants were told the funds prioritized reducing volatility and guarding against large losses, and that the price of that protection was that the funds would not compare favorably with stock-heavy funds during bull markets.
Then came one of the longest bull markets in history. The diversified fund beat its disclosed target of a five percent annual return above inflation. The plaintiffs sued anyway, alleging that the funds trailed riskier stock-heavy funds and market indexes like the S&P 500 during those years.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit disagreed. When a claim rests on comparative underperformance, it held, the plaintiff must supply “a sound basis for comparison—a meaningful benchmark.” Funds with “different aims, different risks, and different potential rewards” cannot fill that role. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 7th, 8th, and 10th Circuits had already said the same. Only the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit has gone the other way, saying no such benchmark is needed.
Several background principles frame the dispute. ERISA’s “prudent man” standard, codified at 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(B), measures a fiduciary’s care against that of “a prudent man acting in a like capacity and familiar with such matters” conducting an “enterprise of a like character and with like aims.” The Supreme Court has spoken to how that standard operates at the pleading stage: 2012’s Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer called the motion to dismiss an “important mechanism for weeding out meritless claims” – the tool for dividing “the plausible sheep from the meritless goats” – while 2019’s Hughes v. Northwestern University instructed courts to give “due regard to the range of reasonable judgments a fiduciary may make” through “context-specific” scrutiny.
The question in Anderson is what those commitments require when a complaint’s theory of imprudence is that the defendant’s fund made less money than some other fund. As noted, here each fund came with disclosed comparators built in. The performance was measured against benchmarks the fiduciaries selected and disclosed to participants, including a customized composite of the underlying benchmarks for each asset class, and respondents also identified the MSCI World Index as a relevant benchmark. On top of that, ERISA’s disclosure regulation independently requires fiduciaries to give participants a comparable broad-based market index for every fund.
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The petitioners, a putative class of Intel plan participants, contend that the 9th Circuit’s meaningful-benchmark requirement is an atextual heightened pleading standard. Nothing in ERISA’s prudence provision mentions benchmarks, meaningful or otherwise; the statute asks only whether the fiduciary’s own conduct was prudent, not whether the plaintiff can first locate a better-performing twin. Under the pleading threshold carved out in the landmark cases of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal they argue, courts must assess a complaint’s allegations holistically, and sustained underperformance – considered alongside allegations about fees, strategy, and asset choices – can “nudge[]” a claim “across the line from conceivable to plausible” without any threshold comparator showing. The requirement is also overinclusive, they warn: a fiduciary whose strategy is truly an outlier may have no analogous fund to point to, leaving the most aberrant conduct the least reviewable. And by demanding a benchmark before discovery, the rule forces plaintiffs to prove comparability at the moment they know least – effectively resolving the merits at the pleading stage.
The Intel fiduciaries respond that the requirement is not an addition to the court’s pleading case law but an application of it. The statute itself speaks in comparative terms – “like capacity,” “like character,” “like aims” – and the petitioners themselves told the district court that it “commands comparisons to similarly situated fiduciaries.” A bare performance gap between dissimilar funds, the respondents argue, supports no inference of a flawed process, because it carries an obvious alternative explanation: funds with different objectives and risk tolerances are supposed to perform differently. A risk-mitigating portfolio trailing an equity-heavy one in a bull market is the strategy working, not failing – especially where, as here, the plans disclosed in advance that the funds “would not compare favorably with equity-heavy funds during bull markets.”
Nor, according to Intel, is the standard a straitjacket. The 9th Circuit disclaimed any demand for identical allocations; a comparator need only share the challenged fund’s basic aims. Indeed, the requirement governs only claims predicated on underperformance: a plaintiff who attacks the process directly – fiduciaries who acted improperly by never meeting, never reviewing data, never monitoring things – or whose circumstantial allegations independently suggest a flawed process needs no comparator at all. And courts routinely find the standard satisfied in practice, crediting comparators with shared objectives or the defendant’s own disclosed benchmarks (benchmarks the Anderson plaintiffs conspicuously declined to invoke).
Both sides, in short, claim the mantle of precedent: the petitioners as defenders of holistic, context-specific review, the respondents as enforcers of the plausibility line. Both also claim ERISA’s purposes: the petitioners emphasize participant protection and access to court; the respondents emphasize the statute’s tolerance for diverse strategies and Congress’ concern that litigation expenses not discourage employers from offering plans at all.
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In my view, the respondents have the better of the argument for a reason that sounds in ERISA’s own design. The statute affirmatively commands diversification and expressly contemplates that fiduciaries may pursue different aims with different risk tolerances. Variation in outcomes is therefore not evidence of a breach; it is the guaranteed byproduct of the conduct Congress prescribed. A pleading regime in which any performance gap against any fund states a claim would convert that statutory design into perpetual litigation exposure, with settlement pressure – not merits adjudication – resolving most cases. The meaningful-benchmark requirement answers that problem without closing the courthouse door. Plaintiffs with genuine process allegations need no comparator, and plaintiffs who choose a comparative theory must simply make a comparison capable of supporting their inference. That is not a heightened pleading standard. It is what plausibility means when the theory is “my fund made less money than that one.”
Which returns us to the stakes. Dudenhoeffer promised pleading-stage review with teeth precisely because ERISA class actions are uniquely expensive to defend and uniquely prone to in terrorem settlement. Allowing a complaint that fails to identify any comparator to advance to summary judgment or trial will make the litigation cost of ERISA plans too high to bear for many employers. That increased exposure will deter new sponsors and prompt existing ones to reconsider offering plans. Many employers – quite rationally – will walk away from offering plans. Who can blame them? Employees, in turn, would lose meaningful benefits.
Anderson will thus reveal whether Dudenhoeffer’s promise still holds. The court should hold that it does, and affirm. The retirement security of more than 100 million Americans may well depend on it.