Dispute Resolution

When legal issues arise, employers that sponsor or contribute to employee benefit plans turn to counsel. And when counsel needs support at any stage, they often turn to October Three’s Dispute Resolution team.

We offer you a group of senior Partners with testifying and consulting experience on a broad range of matters and a team of outstanding actuaries and consultants to support them with research and analysis. It’s a winning combination.

The right time to involve the team at October Three is as soon as you know you need additional skills. We’ve been brought in at various stages:

• Before the suit is filed. We provide support by analyzing risks and often helping counsel formulate their case when an organization fits a pattern of other employers being sued.

• As soon as counsel is chosen. We work with litigation counsel to better understand the operational, procedural, and actuarial issues behind the dispute, and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the case.

• To quantify the company’s exposure. Working with counsel, we apply actuarial and modeling principles to help clients understand the potential size of any alleged damages. This helps counsel and their clients develop a strategy.

• During discovery. Our team answers questions posed by counsel to craft expert reports that may be submitted to the court. Or in cases where we might not be testifying experts, we help counsel with quantitative and qualitative analysis of the case.

• At deposition. Our experts have been deposed frequently and have learned tricks of the trade to avoid giving the other side information they can use should the case go to trial.

• At trial. We’ve testified frequently and successfully in a litany of cases related to retirement benefits and programs.

• Post-trial. Many cases that we are involved in are appealed to higher courts. We work with counsel and clients to analyze costs and settlement options and to understand how to implement the court’s verdict.

October Three can also assist you in non- or pre-litigation issues by crafting responses to benefits claims from an employee or their attorney. In addition, we provide compliance review services, such as resolving ambiguities in a plan or SPD language or helping to identify operational issues.

Many other actuarial and employee benefit firms are unwilling or unable to effectively take on these kinds of projects. We view this work as important, and our dispute resolution consultants have considerable experience in these matters.

Almost all of our cases involve some form of retirement benefits. A partial list of topics on which we have consulted or testified includes:

• Actuarial equivalence
• Pension Risk Transfer
• Withdrawal liability
• Cash balance conversion
• Nonqualified plan termination
• Interpretation of plan provisions to calculate benefits
• Provider malpractice
• Multiemployer plan payroll audits
• Comparable benefits in mergers and acquisitions
• Value of diminished benefits
• Disputed meaning of plan provisions