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“In the 20’s and 30’s, my grandmother
worked as a fitter for a department store in Pittsburgh. When
the Depression hit, the store’s owner used all the
money in the employee pension plan to keep the store afloat,
and my grandmother’s savings disappeared. She
survived the set-back, but it was a real struggle.”
With his grandmother’s story in mind, Bill found himself
paying close attention to a six-year effort in Congress to
pass ERISA, a vast new piece of legislation intended to prevent
the disasters that befell workers whose companies and pension
plans went bankrupt. Shortly after Congress voted in
favor of ERISA in 1974, Bill received a letter from the General
Counsel of the newly formed Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation,
which was looking for lawyers. Bill was near the end
of his term as a law clerk for a federal appeals judge and
was considering what to do next. He jumped at the opportunity
to join the PBGC—and began his career as an ERISA lawyer.
In the first two decades of his career, Bill participated
in some of ERISA’s most important developments, including
PBGC’s first involuntary termination proceeding; both
PBGC v. Connelly and PBGC v. Nachtman, the first cases that
PBGC had in the Supreme Court; and UMWA Health
and Retirement Funds v. Robinson, a critical precedent-setting ERISA
case for which he prepared Supreme Court briefs in his role
as General Counsel to the United Mine Workers of America
Health and Retirement Funds. By the time Bill joined Groom
in 1987, he had established himself as one of the nation’s
foremost experts on ERISA law.
At Groom, Bill has represented a broad range of clients
in health and pension litigation related to ERISA, but his
primary focus has been on fiduciary disputes arising from
the ERISA statutes that govern the operation of all employee
benefits plans. As Bill puts it, “I want to make
sure that pension plan providers play by the rules and create
plans that work in the best interests of employees and employers
alike.”
His grandmother would not have wanted it any other way. |
