A Brief History of the Firm

Practicing Groundbreaking Law in the Shadow of the White House and Capitol Hill

For decades, Studebaker made solid and reliable automobiles at its plant in South Bend, Indiana.  But in December of 1963, market forces drove the company to close its factory doors for the last time, leaving behind tons of equipment on now-silent assembly lines, parking lots full of recently manufactured cars, an empty office building—and a pension plan that defaulted on almost all of the company’s obligations to almost all of its employees.

Studebaker was not the only manufacturer in the 1960s to go under and take its pension fund with it.  But its closing seemed to galvanize reform-minded politicians and federal regulators, and Congress began deliberations on legislation designed to impose funding rules and vesting requirements on employee benefit plans so that workers would get what they had earned.

For the next decade, lawmakers wrote and re-wrote the legislation and debated endlessly over what agencies would be responsible for administering the new law.  But finally, on Labor Day in 1974, President Ford signed into law the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), and for the first time workers could count on some degree of federal protection for their benefits.

Few law firms were prepared to handle the legal issues that immediately arose from the new legislation.  Groom Law Group was an exception.  Ted Groom had been actively involved in the legislative process that resulted in ERISA, developing a reputation on Capitol Hill for his knowledgeable representation of the interests of clients in the benefits community.  As the development of the law shifted to the federal agencies and the courts, Ted Groom's new law firm actively shaped early interpretations of the act and helped to design its administrative procedures.  By the early 1980s, the firm had established a considerable national reputation for its work on employee benefits issues arising under ERISA.

Now the nation’s largest employee benefits law firm of attorneys practicing collaboratively in a single location, Groom handles a wide range of sophisticated benefits and tax matters for clients in industry, finance, and the public sector.