ERIC Files Amicus Briefs in Forfeiture, Pension Calculation Cases

As Employee Retirement Income Security Act lawsuits continue to move through the federal courts, industry groups are increasingly filing on behalf of employers to highlight how plaintiffs’ success victories could affect plan fiduciaries and sponsors.

In the last week, the ERISA Industry Committee filed two separate amicus curie briefs showing support toward employers.

The first brief, filed by ERIC and the U.S Chamber of Commerce in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Friday, supports Ochsner Clinic’s use of plan forfeitures and urges the appeals court to affirm the district court’s dismissal of the related case, Estay v. Ochsner Clinic Foundation.

ERIC filed another amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, calling for the reversal of a 6th Circuit Court ruling in FedEx Corp v. Watt and Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Pension Committee v. Reichert.

While the briefs tackle different claims, both reflect a growing trend of plaintiffs attempting to expand plan sponsors’ fiduciary obligations beyond those established under ERISA, according to Doug Hinson, executive director of ERIC’s Legal Center.

“Both [are] types of cases [in which] somebody looking at the way the rules work [is] finding a chink in the armor and finding an argument to be made that employers are doing something wrong,” he says. “They want to come and say, ‘Yeah, we know what the rules are, but we think the rules should be something different, and we are going to interpret the obligations of fiduciaries or the obligations of plan sponsors in a way that’s different.’”

The Right to Forfeiture

The Friday brief regarding Estay v. Ochsner Clinic Foundation highlights that an employer’s 401(k) matching contribution does not always outright belong to the employee.

The case, first filed in March 2025, claims that the plan sponsors of the Ochsner Clinic Foundation’s 401(k) plan violated ERISA by using forfeited employer contributions to offset employer contributions for other participants.

Forfeitures are the non-vested portions of employer contributions, including matches or profit-sharing, left behind in a defined contribution plan when an employee leaves the company before meeting the plan’s vesting requirements.

Plaintiffs argued that using forfeited funds to offset employer contributions to other participants breached ERISA’s fiduciary standards and constituted a prohibited transaction. The district court rejected those claims and dismissed the case in March 2026.

Now as the 5th Circuit Court considers an appeal, Hinson says ERIC wants to make sure the court “gets it right.”

According to the brief, long-standing Treasury Department regulations, legislative history and tax rules have consistently treated the practice as lawful, making plaintiffs’ claims inconsistent with a framework that Congress has left unchanged for decades. The Department of Labor has filed at least five amicus briefs in forfeiture cases in 2026 supporting plan sponsors and urging courts to reject fiduciary breach claims.

“Treasury regs do protect this practice. In fact, they’ve endorsed this practice and so for decades, plan sponsors have written their plans consistent with those regulations and have made these decisions consistent with those regulations,” says Hinson. “It’s only been in recent years that the plaintiffs’ bar has come up with a theory that instead of plan sponsors acting in their plan sponsor capacity when they’re making the decision of what to do with these forfeitures, they’re claiming that the plan sponsors are wearing a fiduciary hat when making that decision.”

The legal representatives for the plaintiffs, Tulio Chirinos of Chirinos Law Firm PLLC and Charles Stiegler of Stiegler Law Firm LLC, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Challenging Pension Calculations

The second amicus brief asks the U.S. Supreme Court to review FedEx Corp. v. Watt and Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Pension Committee v. Reichert, two cases concerning pensions that were consolidated by the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

The lawsuits challenge the actuarial assumptions used by the pension plans to calculate joint-and-survivor annuity benefits, arguing that some plans relied on outdated mortality tables and interest rates that no longer produce actuarially equivalent benefits.

In March, the 6th Circuit ruled that participants had plausibly alleged the plans used unreasonable actuarial assumptions and allowed the claims to proceed. The court concluded that ERISA’s requirement that benefits be “actuarially equivalent” may impose limits on the assumptions plans use when calculating joint-and-survivor annuities.

In its amicus brief, ERIC argued that the ruling effectively creates a new requirement for plan sponsors to update actuarial assumptions over time, even though ERISA does not explicitly impose such an obligation.

According to Hinson, Congress requires plan sponsors to specify the assumptions used in benefit calculations and has created update requirements in other contexts, such “The Supreme Court has for many years said that when Congress …says ‘You must do it this way’ in one section, but doesn’t change the same rule in another section, that’s not an accident,” he says.

ERIC further argues that the March ruling creates uncertainty for plan sponsors by establishing a new standard without clear guidance on how to comply.

According to ERIC’s brief, that decision could expose more than 20,000 defined benefit plans, representing roughly $4.3 trillion in liabilities, to litigation over competing actuarial opinions. The brief also cited a dissenting opinion in the 6th Circuit’s consolidated decision in FedEx Corp. v. Watt and Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Pension Committee v. Reichert in which Judge John K. Nalbandian wrote that it was “hard to see how this standard will benefit anyone besides the attorneys who litigate these cases.”

He also argued that conflicting court decisions can leave employers uncertain about how to administer retirement plans and ultimately increase the cost and risk of offering workplace benefits.

“The people that are being attacked by this ERISA litigation are the people that are providing the benefits,” Hinson says. “We have a voluntary benefit system in this country, and they don’t have to provide these plans, much less do they have to provide, for example, matching contributions that are at issue in the forfeiture cases, and they don’t have to provide these defined benefit plans.”