Practice Areas > Employee Benefits
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Stearns Weaver Miller’s Employee Benefits practice counsels employers in the design, implementation and operation of employee pension and welfare plans and executive equity and deferred compensation programs. We also represent employers before the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor in the matters of initial and continuing tax qualification and audits of plans. We advise employers on handling employees’ claims for benefits, as well as strategizing the defense of any claims. Further, we have considerable experience providing tax advice and services to tax-exempt organizations in their efforts to provide competitive benefits to diverse groups of employees.
Our lawyers have handled significant and sophisticated ERISA litigation on behalf of employers, plan administrators, trustees and individual defendants. We have handled the defense of numerous types of claims, including claims for severance, disability and other welfare benefits; claims for benefits under ERISA top hat plans, such as supplemental executive retirement plans; claims for breach of fiduciary duty against corporate board members, internal benefits appeals committees, and trustees; claims of procedural and substantive violations under ERISA plans; discrimination under ERISA § 510; and claims for executive benefits and stock options.
We have litigated ERISA cases in state court, federal district court, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and have briefed issues to the United States Supreme Court. Our Employee Benefits lawyers have experience with issues of ERISA exhaustion of administrative remedies requirement and futility issues, ERISA preemption, statute of limitations issues (regarding both fiduciary and non-fiduciary claims), distinguishing between fiduciary and settlor functions, issues relating to the appropriate standard of review and plan administrators’ conflicts of interest, interpretation of plan amendment, termination, vesting, accrual and anti-cutback provisions, remedies available for technical procedural violations, delegation of fiduciary and claims administration functions, ERISA’s church plan exemption, and attorney-client privilege issues.